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Studio cabling

R

RoA

pfm Member
Not wanting to crap on another thread, this subject was raised;

Does it really matter what cables they use in studio surroundings other than reliability and low noise over longer distances?

There is not much they can't correct, add or take away anyway by means we, listeners, do not normally have.

As you've guessed, I am no engineer.

I am aware that some use cheap ones (Abbey Rd?) ... others probably go slightly more elaborate.
 
Van Damme generally for live shows and Mogami in our studio. We buy it by the drum and make up cables as required.
 
RoA said:
Does it really matter what cables they use in studio surroundings other than reliability and low noise over longer distances?
Click to expand...

Reliability, low noise, and decent measurements/specification. No studio wants to use anything that re-EQs the sound the way of so much fancy audiophile stuff that is designed to sound different/“impressive” in an A B dem. What goes in one end should come out of the other. Specification matters as a lot of studio kit is very sensitive to capacitance etc (mics, guitars etc).

Technically a lot isn’t “cheap” either, it is just good quality cable made in such quantities economy of scale comes into play, plus it doesn’t have the LOLtastic usually >50% dealer markup!

PS FWIW I use Mogami 2972 studio speaker cable in my main system and prefer it to various far more expensive audiophile options I’ve tried over the years. It just sounds of nothing to my ears. No added flavour. No hype. No attention-seeking. My interconnects are a real mix of stuff including a fair bit of vdH as it can often be had cheaper than buying the parts and wasting time making stuff myself. I’ve even got some Kimber PBJ just in case I need to prove to anyone cables sound different!
 
A lot of (active) studio kit is designed to be robust and not care what impedance/capacitance cables you hang off it, passive stuff is more picky. We used to use a lot of vandamme and another brand I don't recall from fuzion, that was nice stuff but 1000m minimum order, we bought big reels! The connections on the end were a bigger deal to the sound than the cable in-between (we did listening tests).
If you have noisy/triac dimmable lighting, you probably only care that it's a star quad cable not regular twinscreen mic cable.
You just want reliable above everything else in a studio, if you have 120 musicians/people being paid £75/hour you do not want to waste any time chasing cable issues because you are using something fancy which is now damaged because someone ran a flight case over it. Its very much do it once get it right, if you are recording a 30minute piece then you want that done in 31minutes, no wasting time.
 
I've tried several times to upgrade to a more expensive speaker cable than my Canare 4s11g, but I've gone back to Canare every time. It's an amazing cable. However, compared to the Canare the VanDamme studio speaker cable sounds more simplistic with poorer timbres.
So even the studio cables sound different.
 
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