Balanced Vs Unbalanced Instrument Cables

Henry ott february 07 2005 in discussing the characteristics and performance of various interconnect systems.

Balanced vs unbalanced instrument cables.

The concept of the 3 5 mm tip is the same as a quarter inch. 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. Any noise picked up along the cable run will typically be common to both legs. 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.

The structure of a balanced audio cable is similar to an unbalanced cable with one addition. Both legs carry the same signal but in opposite polarity to each other. In truth the main advantage an unbalanced cable has over a balanced cable is the cost. 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.

Two points should be kept in mind. A typical unbalanced cable like a 1 4 instrument cable has 2 conductors. A ground a positive leg and a negative leg. The added safety of the balanced cable comes at a cost and even after you make the purchase you still need to pair your cables with.

Unbalanced cables by dr. The main difference comparing balanced vs unbalanced cables is a balanced cable has 1 additional conductor. Below is a diagram showing the difference in tips. The 1st conduction is the audio signal itself and the 2nd is a ground and often a shielding.

As you can see there is a big difference between unbalanced and balanced quarter inch cables. The ts plugs are our guitar cables and the trs plugs are our 3 5mm aux cables. A balanced electrical signal runs along three wires.