Balanced Or Unbalanced Instrument Cable

Can i use a trs cable as a ts cable.

Balanced or unbalanced instrument cable.

One wire carries the signal and is referred to as the hot line. The balanced cable will have 1 hot 1 cold and a ground shielding. The balanced cable conveyed a tighter cleaner sound that made the mix from the unbalanced cable seem soft and unrefined in comparison. It wasn t huge but noticeable enough to consider upgrading my own cable.

The other is the ground wire that s connected to to an insulated wrap and is also called the common ground earth or shield. Most unbalanced music instrument cables have two conductor wires. Trs cables can occasionally be used instead of a ts cable but the signal is still unbalanced. Unbalanced cables aren t good for doing long cable runs for this reason in fact you should be using balanced ones if the cable needs to be more than 10 15 meters long.

Unbalanced ts cables should be used with unbalanced input and outputs. Unbalanced cables work great for connecting a guitar to an amp for instance but because they are not very good at suppressing noise from outside interference unbalanced cables should have a maximum length of 15 20 feet 4 6 meters especially when used in noisy environments and with signals that are low level to begin with such as those from keyboards guitars mp3 devices and so on. Connecting a keyboard with unbalanced ts outputs to the unbalanced input on a di box or the instrument input on a mixer. The diagram above shows how the cable works.

The main difference comparing balanced vs unbalanced cables is a balanced cable has 1 additional conductor. I m surprised to say that i did indeed hear a difference. A common question we get is are guitar cables balanced or unbalanced the short answer is guitar cables are unbalanced but dig in a little deeper to understand some basic principles in order to grasp what this truly means. Balanced vs unbalanced cables.

Unbalanced ts mono cables quarter inch guitar cables are unbalanced cables that are mono. A balanced audio cable has a ground wire but it also carries two copies of the same incoming audio signal sometimes referred to as a hot positive and cold negative signal. With regard to balanced versus unbalanced instrument cables the simplest way to explain it is. The 1st conduction is the audio signal itself and the 2nd is a ground and often a shielding.

Of course things are rarely so simple and straightforward in the audio world so a little more detail is in in order. A typical unbalanced cable like a 1 4 instrument cable has 2 conductors. The structure of a balanced audio cable is similar to an unbalanced cable with one addition.