Audio Cables & Connectors Explained: Plus Balanced vs Unbalanced Guide

hello and welcome back to my channel where I'm sharing hints tips and tricks on how to make home recording easy one of my subscribers recently posted I think it would be cool if you dedicated a video to different sorts of audio cables how you set them up an explanation of all the different types so that is what I'm going to do here because in fairness I get a lot of questions about which is the right audio cable to connect this thing to that thing in my home studio so this video is going to be a complete overview of all the different kinds of audio cables you might find in a home studio now your goal in your home recording studio is to record a nice clean and allowed in a signal from your microphone or your guitar your keyboard since drum machine whatever it is you want to record in your recording software or digital audio workstation and recording success has a lot to do with the audio cable types you choose if you get the audio connections right and the levels right then your audio recordings will sound good the main focus in this video is going to be on analog audio cables predominantly so I'm going to be looking at XLR TRS TS RCA phono Jack these are the most common analog audio cables and they're the ones that you use most often because mostly you're trying to get a signal from analog sources I'm also going to have a look at MIDI cables but talking about other kinds of digital connections is really beyond the scope of this video I just want to talk about getting good play signals from your audio equipment now one of the things you do need to get to grips with when you are making recordings is the different levels that you will encounter depending on what you try to record so a microphone has the lowest signal and so you will require a preamp to get the signal coming out of the microphone up to a decent level so that you can record it fortunately most audio interfaces have got a built-in preamp so you don't have to worry about buying anything extra you just simply connect your microphone up via an XLR connection into the microphone input and adjust the gain on the interface and so you get a decent level from your microphone instruments like keyboards and drum machines and synth will output at line level which is much much higher and doesn't require any further amplification so when you connect a line level signal you are adjusting the volume coming out of the instrument the keyboard or whatever it is that you're trying to record and just connect it into the right input on your interface so that you get a good recording from that and finally if you are recording directly from your guitar then you're recording its instrument level and you will require a bit of gain on that but you'll also be adjusting the volume that's coming out of your guitar so there'll be two places where you can adjust the gain on the signal but again you need to make sure that you connect your guitar up correctly so if you have a look at the front of a typical audio interface you'll see that many of them they have what are called dual format inputs and so the inputs can take either an XLR lead from a microphone or they can take a quarter-inch input from an instrument or from a line level signal coming out of your keyboard or synth so three different levels mic level line level instrument level so that's something you'll need to think about when you're connecting up not just what the cable looks like but the actual signal that it's carrying so now let's have a look at the different kinds of physical cables that you're going to come across and let's start with the microphone lead the XLR lead because that's probably the simplest to understand so it has a three pin connector generally has a female end and the male end one end goes into your microphone and the other end goes into the XLR input on the interface so pretty straightforward two connector and what you need to know now about an XLR lead is that it is actually what's known as a balanced connection so a balanced cable is a cable that has three wires running through it it has two wires that are carrying the signal and one that is a ground wire so on the XLR lead it's quite easy to picture that because you've got your three pins those three pins are connected to three different wires to our conductor wires carrying the signal one is carrying the ground now what happens is both those wires that are carrying the signal are carrying the same signal but one signal is a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with the other now what this means is as the signal is being carried along the cable it is liable to pick up noise as it travels and when the signal gets to the interface or mixer input the two signals are flipped and added to each other that means that the noise that has built upon the signal is cancelled out so you get a nice clean signal at the end of the path and that is what we mean by a balanced connection that will be important to remember in a bit when we look at TRS cables because you'll see the same kind of thing but it's very easy to visualize with the XLR lead let's look at another really common connector that you're going to see an awful lot and that is the quarter inch or six point three five millimeter if you are metric jack plug so a lead with the jack plug at the end isn't often known as a jack lead and it's a very very common connector this is the one that you use if you are connecting up a guitar or a mono output from a line level instrument like a keyboard and the one that I'm showing at the moment is the TS jack plug the tip sleeve Jack plug now what you need to know about this is it is only connected to two wires in the cable so the sleeve is connected to a wire and the tip is connected to a wire so one wire is carrying the signal and one wire is carrying the ground this being an unbalanced cable it's unbalanced because it is not carrying two signals that are out of phase it is only carrying one signal and so what is likely to happen if you have a very long cable is it is likely to pick up noise and the noise will not get canceled out at the end because there is no other out of phase signal to cancel it out so this tip sleeve quarter-inch jack plug is at the end of an unbalanced connection guitars have an unbalanced output on them that's just the way they are wired up and so if you're connecting your guitar up you'll use one of these cables and so you don't want the cable to be too long between your guitar and your interface if you're connecting from the output of a keyboard and it has unbalanced out so you're using quarter-inch TS jacks like this then you are making an unbalanced connection so again keep the cables as short as you can now one thing you can do if you have got unbalanced connections like this is you can run the lead into what's called a DI box which then trapped hands the unbalanced connection into a balanced connection and now going from the DI box you can have a much longer cable run actually in a home studio this is not so important because generally you're working in a very small space anyway so you can get away with quite short cables really you'd use a DI box in a much larger environment if you're in a big studio or if you're working live and so what you're looking at here again if I just say one more time is you are looking at a cable that can only carry one signal so it is going to carry mono signal and it is unbalanced this jack plug is exactly the same size and shape but it is a TRS plug so it's got a tip a ring and a sleeve and guess what that means that if it is connected up to three wires in the cable so there are two ways that you can use the TRS jack lead now one is you can use it to carry a stereo signal so the left and the right of the signal are transmitted down this cable and then you've got the third wire that is carrying the ground if you are making a stereo connection then it will be unbalanced so your jack plug if it looks like that tip ring sleeve you can use it to make a stereo connection or you can use it to make a mono balanced connection because those two wires instead of carrying the left and right signal can now carry the same signal out of phase just like with the XLR lead and when the signal reaches the in put on the interface again has that flipping and adding together so that it cancels out the noise so again when you're using balanced cables so if you used a TRS cable as a balanced cable then you can have a much longer cable run so what we've covered there is the basic difference between those two kinds of jack plugs TRS and TS and so this is another kind of connector you see an awful lot and it's called the RCA phono cable and these function very much like TS cables so each cable runs one signal down it so it is unbalanced and it is also mono so often you'll get a pair of these cables together and you'll have a left and a right then it can operate as a stereo connection but each one is mono very straightforward but unbalanced so again you need to keep the cables as short as possible if you're using RCA cables for completeness here the jack plug that we looked at before which was quarter-inch or six point three five millimeter has a little brother or sister which is the TRS cable at it is 3.5 millimeter or eighth of an inch and this mini jack cable you'll often see it on the end of headphones often headphones will come with adapter so that you can make the headphones quarter-inch if you need to depending on the size of the headphone output that you have now here's another common kind of cable that we need to talk about and that is what's called a Y cable or a breakout cable now these are quite common if you have equipment that has stereo outputs and you want to connect them to the left-right mono input on an audio interface so this one I'm showing you here has a 3.5 millimeter stereo plug at one end of it and then two quarter-inch 6.35 male mono jack plugs at the other and so what it does is it splits the stereo signal into a left and right mono again this is unbalanced and you'll often use this if you want to record anything that's got an orbs output so you put that in there and then be able to split the signal and make the plugs the right size to go into your audio interface and here's something else you'll often see it's the t r r s tip ring ring sleeve and it's usually 3.5 millimeter because this is the kind of plug that goes into your smartphone your laptop your tablet it's a input and output at the same time because one of the rings is carrying the microphone signal one way and the other rings are carrying the headphone signal the other way so you can listen to your headphones and record through mic at the same time with this but this is not really a pro audio cable it's just some that you'll see quite often I'm not going to cover all the different digital cables that you might find in a recording studio however this one digital cable is an exception it's the MIDI cable and this is a 5-pin din cable that enables you to connect up different kinds of MIDI equipment so if you've got a keyboard with a MIDI output and you've got some other sort of MIDI hardware with MIDI input you can connect the two together and control one from the other or you might have an interface with MIDI in and out on it and alike which I would allow you to connect your keyboard or the MIDI instrument directly up to your interface and so this is a MIDI lead now that has covered the main kinds of cables that you like to encounter in your home recording studio and what I want to do now is have a closer look at an audio interface just to see all these different kinds of connections in action so let's start on the front panel you can see that this interface has two June format input so you can either connect an XLR lead or you can connect a quarter-inch lead now on this interface you can have balanced or unbalanced quarter-inch inputs and so it will automatically detect what kind of cable you put in and treat it as such so if you connect quarter-inch TRS cables to the left and right inputs on this interface then you will make a balanced connection as long as the output from your device that you are recording has got balanced outputs so if you have a high-quality keyboard that has balanced outputs then you can use TRS leads to connect to this input and make balanced connections and you'll be recording with balanced signal if you connect your guitar then that as I said before it's an unbalanced connection unless you have run it through a DI box so straight out of your guitar it's going to be an unbalanced mono connection and this is one more thing that you need to know about the difference between balanced and unbalanced if you want to make a balanced connection every single item in the signal chain must be balanced now the headphone output is a quarter-inch stereo output so you'd be connecting a TRS connection to that but it would be unbalanced because it's just connecting a stereo output to your headphones now flipping it over you'll see that this interface has got MIDI in and out you could make a MIDI connection through this interface and finally you have got two different choices of output on this interface if we go to the right you'll see there are two balanced outputs so left and right and to connect these up to a speaker with balanced inputs you would connect two TRS quarter-inch jacks into each of those outputs to do a left and right output so you've got balanced TRS outputs but you have also got unbalanced line outputs take RCA cables and you have got two sets of outputs so in fact this interface encompasses almost every cable that we've actually talked about in this video so it's quite a nice way of showing you all the different cables in action so what I've done in this video is I have covered all the main kinds of audio cables that you'll likely to come across in a typical home recording studio plus we've talked about balanced and unbalanced connections and also the different levels of signals that you're likely to have to think about when you're making recordings I hope you found it useful if you need to know anything else don't forget as usual post comments below and I will try and help you out further thanks for watching I hope you found that useful and if you did please do like the video if you've got any questions or comments don't forget to post them below and if you want to get more of my tips and tricks on home recording then please do subscribe to the channel well thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Music Repo

Views: 48,795

Keywords: MusicRepoTV1, Music Repo, MusicRepoTV, 1/4 inch, 3.5mm, 3.5mm audio jack, audio cable, audio cable tutorial, audio cables and connectors, audio cables explained, balanced, balanced vs unbalanced, do audio cables affect sound quality, guitar, home studio, jack, keyboard, microphone, midi, mini jack, phono, pro audio, rca, recording, stereo, stereo unbalanced trs, trs, trs vs ts, tutorial, types, unbalanced, understand audio, what is xlr, xlr, xlr cable, audio interface, audio cable types

Id: ACCTcYCvuZM

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019