Balanced Unbalanced Cables Guitar

Balanced cables are great at rejecting noise which makes them an excellent option for stage use where interference is common.

Balanced unbalanced cables guitar.

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. 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. This is especially true if it needs to be used in an environment where there s a lot of lights and other stuff that could cause interference. If you re using a very short unbalanced cable or using a longer unbalanced cable on a loud device like a guitar there won t be a difference at all.

Any noise picked up along the cable run will typically be common to both legs. For running a guitar into an amp an unbalanced cable is more than adequate. Ultimately in the debate of balanced vs. 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.

In many cases you can reverse the process when feeding a balanced output signal to an unbalanced input. A ground a positive leg and a negative leg. A balanced electrical signal runs along three wires. Unbalanced cables the best cable is the one the fits your needs.

Balanced cables have a very low signal to noise ratio so will often give you a much better sound especially over longer cables. Having cables with this kind of output makes it easy to directly connect unbalanced sources such as guitar effects directly into recording gear daws and signal processors with balanced inputs. The differences between balanced and unbalanced cables are subtle enough that it s easy to miss them at first.