Quality Budget Gear Ep. 08: Cables
This is another recording studio item with huge bang for the buck, provided you’re able to spend just a little bit more up front.
Don’t cheap out on your cables, but you only need the super fancy Mogami ones if you’re doing professional work in a professional space. Going mid-level is the right advice for most people, most of the time, and that’s also true in the case of cables for your music studio.
Treat your cables with respect:
Understand that if you build a music studio with a bunch of dirt cheap cables connecting everything, the tradeoff is wasted time every single day tracking down buzz and noise. And nothing kills a creative recording session faster than having to stop writing to troubleshoot cable buzz.
When noise in your studio matters, and when it doesn’t
In music production, all noise is not created equal. Just because you’ve got some noise, tape hiss, or a little cable buzz in your recordings doesn’t automatically make them vibey. Clean recordings are not always sterile recordings, either. It’s not that simple, unfortunately.
But, it’s all about what you want to do! Maybe all of this cable and noise talk doesn’t matter if your plan is to record simple rough demos at home, and re-record them professionally later. It probably matters a lot if your goal is to build a studio to put out professional quality work, either for yourself or others.
Solutions for cable noise
Ways to treat your cables with respect:
Learn to coil them properly to avoid kinking. Here’s a video on how to do that.
Try to minimize stepping on them, or rolling chairs over them.
Arrange your cables so that their hanging weight isn’t being applied to their end connectors. Support those end connections by supporting the cable weight just behind them. The end connectors are a common point of failure on all cables.
