Understanding Audio Cables & Connectors

hey everybody Kenneth's Russell here I hope you're doing great today today I'm talking about cables how to understand cables and their connectors check it out well if you're a musician or working in sound in any way you're gonna come across cables and all different types of cables and sometimes it can be kind of daunting if you're just getting into it because there's all these different connectors you don't know what they're called so let's talk about the connectors and the first half of this video and then we're going to talk about the cable itself in the second half of the video by the way a huge shout out to hose at cables for sending me all these cables and they're just awesome cables I've been buying hose the cables for years if you're looking to buy an instrument cable for your guitar or microphone or whatever kind of cable you're looking for don't look any further than hose it there they really are awesome cables and they have different levels good better best and they're all very good actually so let's talk about connectors the first connector I want to talk about is the quarter inch connector this would be also called an instrument cable or a guitar cable quarter inch instrument guitar cable these are all synonymous with each other so if someone says hey hand me that guitar cable or hand me that instrument cable this is what they're talking about so the quarter inch cable just has two ends like this usually and this is the male connector they're both male connectors and we'll talk about that in a second but they basically just one goes into your guitar one goes into your pedal board or amp there's a bunch of different applications for quarter-inch cables so that's this is what the quarter-inch connector looks like now there is a male end and a female end to just about any cable Burling and this is the male end and I'll let you decide why it's called the male end I'm not gonna go into that but let me see where was the other one I was looking at oh and then this is the the female end there and it's just basically it go the male end goes into the female end and so you know on your guitar that's what this is going to be this is the female quarter-inch connector or the jack times people just say Jack if it's attached to something it's usually called a jack then you just plug it in like that so in theory I could have the end of this cable could be a female connector and I could keep on connecting them and just making a big long chain so this is the quarter-inch connectors the male and female quarter-inch connectors the next kind of cable is the XLR cable and that is this right here now XLR technically is just the the designation for the cable end itself but usually when someone says XLR cable they're meaning give me a microphone cable or a cable with the an audio cable with these connectors at the end of it so you can see here this also has two ends to it this is the female end because it's got three holes there and this is the male end it's got three stems there and they connect together and you can make audio cables like this microphone cables connect together and loop like that which there's no purpose than that other than storing it maybe but you can connect them daisy chaining them and then on the back of your speaker or whatever it's going to have one of these ends that's going to plug into or your microphone there's a lot of different uses for this on a mixing desk most of the inputs are going to be XLR if it's a pro mixing desk sometimes you'll have quarter-inch on the mixing desk as well usually those are your main connectors also XLR cables can be data cables used for DMX lights and we'll talk about that in just a minute right now we're gonna talk about just the connectors themselves the next connector that is not known as much on the lower end stuff but a lot higher in pro audio gear has speakon connectors and this is a speakon connector right there and this is I think these are both the male ends right here now you'll see sometimes that there'll be a female end this is what the the female end looks like and they click in like that now the great thing about speakon connectors is they lock into place until you pull this back and you want to do it so basically they just go in like this you twist them locks into place and then you've got a very secure cable until you pull this back so these are speaking on connectors if you can use them for your speakers these are great because you're not going to have anybody tripping over a cable and it unplugs so if you're a DJ maybe you're a mobile church setting up in a school where people are walking around a lot it's not a permanent situation if you have the choice for speak on there they're very very good a lot of times - you'll hear the word new tricks it'll someone will say hey give me a new tricks cable or that new tricks connector and it actually isn't a new tricks cable or new tricks connect or new tricks is a brand name so it's kind of like Kleenex so then you know some of those give me a Kleenex they really they're just saying give me a tissue but Kleenex is synonymous with that so sometimes if someone says give me a new tricks connector they really mean speak on and a lot of times you'll have a quarter-inch to speak on adapter it used as well if your speaker cabinet only has speakon connectors but you only have quarter-inch cables the next kind of connector we're going to talk about is the RCA cable now this one has a lot of different applications that you will see not just in pro audio but in home audio as well and this is what the the RCA connector looks like there and you know you'll see this a lot of times in the back of like a stereo system there's just a lot of applications the the consumer world has really embraced the RCA connector but it also has a lot of purposes in pro audio and in sound for example a lot of times if you're doing anything stereo if you're coming from a computer and you're hooking up into mixing desk a lot of times they'll have from your computer to a like one cable coming out of that which we'll talk about in a second then it's making a Y connection to the mixing desk left and right a lot of times the other end of these will say we'll have a red and a yellow bees are also used in video as well and they're they're pretty cool cable because they'll transmit a lot of different types of information but this is the RCA connector right here so the connector itself is called RCA the next connector is a 3.5 millimeter connector or a eighth inch sometimes is what it's called it actually 3.5 is is more accurate but let me open this up here you're probably very familiar with this because this is the kind of connector that's going to be on your phone so if you're you're plugging this in from an iPod or an iPhone into something else this is going to be the connector so that that little jack that's on everybody's phone that is a a 3.5 millimeter jack now I'm gonna actually grab my headphones here this is actually the headphones to my phone right here and you can see on this one there's actually three white lines there that's because this has a microphone hooked up into this there's actually three different signals happening left right and then the microphone usually though in the audio world you're gonna see this connector right here which is got two lines here this is a stereo connector which means there's a left and a right so this this has a stereo connector now this is the same type of thing you're gonna see a male in like this and a female in also before I move on to far this is a quarter-inch cable with a stereo connector there a left and right so this actually has two cables in here two signals going through this cable as well we'll talk about that a little bit more in a second the next cable we're going to talk about is MIDI this is a MIDI cable here and it's got two different ends like this that have five pins they look similar to an XLR but they have five pins this is a data cable it's going to transmit ones and zeros from a keyboard or an effects pedal or there's a lot of applications this is definitely a pro audio cable here so a lot of times on the back of keyboards you'll see MIDI a lot of times keyboards are kind of moving away from MIDI and they're going to USB so a lot of your older keyboards are gonna see MIDI instead of the USB if you're hooking it up like to a computer to record or something like that so this is a MIDI cable and it produces or transmits Dabba so now that we've talked about the different types of connectors in cables let's talk about the cable itself so for example let me compare a few different cables they might have this is a guitar cable and this is a speaker cable both of these have quarter inch jacks here but they are made for two different reasons obviously this guitar cable this generally when someone says quarter-inch cable they're talking about an instrument cable they're talking about this this is before instrument purposes but this thicker cable here is for speaker purposes now here's the thing with this sometimes you can take a instrument cable and hook it up to a speaker and it'll work but instrument cables are not made for speakers instrument cables are not rated they're not made for sending loud to a loud speaker spending sending gotta go to a loudspeaker so even though sometimes if you hook up this cable to a speaker it'll work it's not going to be as good at audio and I think you might be able to damage your equipment if it's if it's kept on for a long long time if you're just testing something out it'll be just fine but if you're if you're carrying a load on this this cable is probably gonna get kind of hot and I just wouldn't do it now the other way around if you take a speaker cable and try to use this for guitar it's not gonna do anything bad and it's not gonna do anything good either it's not going to be able to transfer this signal is literally just won't go through so any way that sometimes you'll see these two different connectors used for two different purposes so how do you know if it's a connector or not like close this one here this one looks just like an instrument cable but it's not it's a speaker cable so how do you know on the cable itself see if you can read that there it'll say speaker cable and this one says speaker gage speaker cable 16 gauge and so on these on the instrument cable it's going to say either instrument or guitar cable I love it you can see that there or not but it'll say guitar cable on there so or instrument cable that's how you know so whenever you you if you have a lot of cables you might want to just label that's what I do a lot of times I'll just put a piece of tape on the end of it and I'll just put GTR or spk or something like that so I know if that's a speaker cable or if it is in fact a instrument cable the next kind of connector is XLR and these three can all be used for speaker you can use a speak on XLR or quarter-inch cable and here's the thing there's really not much of a difference between these cables if you're hooking them up to a speaker you're pretty much gonna get the same audio matter of fact a speak on cable and a quarter inch cable these are the same cables with just different connectors at the end now the XLR cable is a balanced cable but it's not really going to make a difference in the sound that you have if you have a buzz in your system perhaps you might want to try to use an XLR instead of another cable but generally speaking XLR quarter-inch speakon they're all gonna work really well for speakers but there are three different connectors just depending on the manufacturer they may want to use only quarter-inch or only XLR or only speak on lot of Cape a lot of backs of speaker cabinets have all three of them on it so just it's the same basic thing people ask sometimes are you going to get a lesser quality audio if you use a adapter like one of these going from a quarter inch to the speakon no you're not all of the speak on is doing is just making that really secure connection now over time probably it's going to wear better the speakon connector is then a quarter inch connector but it's going to give you the same sound same thing with if you're converting anything if you're if you're having like going from an eighth inch to a quarter inch it's the same sound it's just the connector transmitting the signal if it's a quality connector then it's going to be have good sound coming to it now let's talk about XLR cables both data and audio cables okay so if it's a longer XLR audio cable usually it's going to be labeled like this one says microphone cable sometimes you'll see them where they're labeled just XLR or they'll just say audio cable I'll see this one here this one just says balanced interconnected this one is shorter it says it's a five-foot cable it's just says audio and the reason why that is is because a five-foot cable is not going to be very good for a microphone because you can't hold it for very long heating to stand and sing with it so XLR cables are the connectors but one is data and one is microphone what does that mean these have different images basically they're going to produce different frequencies and so they're gonna transmit frequencies better for the different applications so a lot of times you can actually take a XLR microphone cable and plug it into a DMX light which is going to be a it's transmitting GABA ones and zeros digital signal and it'll actually transmit it but it won't do it well and it's going to have some interference and it's not going to be as reliable as a DMX cable basically the DMX cable is better at transmitting the digital information so unless you're just in an absolute pinch use a data cable to transmit DMX signals and don't use a microphone cable here's the thing data cables the DMX cable will not go the other way around you cannot use the DMX cable for a microphone or any sort of audio it just simply is incapable of transmitting that information it's not made for that it's a digital cable it's not an analog cable for those purposes so you can try to hook it up it's just you're never gonna get sound out of it but it does you can use the microphone cable for digital even though it's not recommended but it will not go the other way around therefore what I do is I always label my DMX cables I just put a piece of tape on it and I write dmx on it just so that there's no way in the pinch you know the thing is whenever you need a new cable you don't always have a lot of time so you're just like grabbing a cable and you're trying to hook it up so I always make sure that it's super super obvious of DMX cables so that I don't accidentally grabbed the wrong one now if you ever had any questions with it it'll say on here let's see if this one says DMX cable four gauge 120 ohm if you look here let me see if it'll focus on that so it'll say DMX cable on the cable itself and on a microphone cable it will either have nothing which is usually they have it now though because DMX is so popular or it'll say microphone cable or it might even say audio cable or instrument cable but usually it says microphone if it is a microphone cable so you want to make sure that it does say audio or microphone on the XLR if you using it for an audio purpose so with cables as you can see it's actually not super complicated there's only really a handful of connectors there's more connectors out there but these are the ones that you're going to encounter most if you're working in sound or you're working in as a musician you're gonna see these connectors all the time it's important that as a musician you're familiar with these because it's kind of the language that everyone is speaking this is the information you're gonna need to know as a musician and so hopefully this was helpful to you there was please hit the thumbs up button subscribe to my youtube channel if you didn't like this video just go ahead and hit the thumbs down button I won't be offended I am kind of surprised you stuck around this long just to hit the thumbs down but if you did I'm it's all good okay I make videos that help make musicians better musicians so hopefully this helped you anyway kennis Russell out and I'll see you in another video

Channel: Kennis Russell

Views: 248,643

Keywords: Musician, sound, understand, types, audio, connector, cables, 1/4 inch, quarter inch, ¼”, XLR, RCA, Speakon, connect, guitar, keyboard, microphone, Mic, sma58, speaker, monitors, audio cables, understanding audio cables and connectors, understand audio, instrument monitor, speaker cables, guitar cables, connectors, Kennis russell, kennisrussell, male, female

Id: dV8rpGUoxns

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2018