These Mic Cables Look the Same but Sound Different & How to Achieve Lowest Noise Recordings 

I once did a de-install at a giant church...it was essentially a 14,000 arena. It had numerous installs done over about 20 year period. Several different PA systems, etc.... When they put new stuff in, they never took the old stuff out....as far as cables for audio, power cables, snakes, etc... As they prepared to install yet another generation of stuff, they determined that all the old stuff needed to be removed. It was actually adding considerable weight to their cat-walk system, and filling up all their available cable paths, etc. They hired me to remove all this stuff, and told me I could keep whatever I wanted, and the rest went into big construction dumpsters. They were all digital now, so all the old XLR snake installs had to come out. Tons of individual XLR cables were used throughout the building to patch into facility tie lines, etc.... So I ended up with mountains of speaker cable, XLR multi pairs snake lines, single XLR cables, 3 and 5 wire power cable, etc... Many of the cables from the first generation of install had grounded XLR connectors, as you have described here, with very high quality connectors and cabling. I own a small sound company, so this was a big win for me! Plus they paid me well for my services. I took all that cable, and made new sub-snakes, new fan-to-fan patch cables. I had so much cable that I could make sets that were specific to each of my mixing consoles, my processing racks, my wireless racks, amp racks, etc... This church had giant 1/4" patchbays at numerous locations... I ended up with literally hundreds of Switchcraft 1/4" connectors. I made up so many 1/4" instrument cables, that its obscene. I keep a handful in every production box and sell them to musicians who forget their own cables....which probably happens at half of the gigs I do, or more. Every time I run into a situation where I need a certain type of cable, at a certain length, I just go make a gang of them, and spread them throughout my various systems. I've designed and created really clever speaker distribution cabling set ups, so I'm not just running individual speaker lines everywhere (which I hate seeing in anyone's rig). If I work with a big sound company, they often have their own little cabling innovations, to make their day easier...so I borrow their ideas every chance I get. My rigs go together, and xo.e down far quicker than most rigs on my level. Anyway, I have mountain of the type of grounded XLR you have described here...and it does make a difference. Even in my old Peavey SRC 2400 mixer...which I still use extensively...you can tell a difference. Occasionally I will need to buy something like a half dozen new mic stands, for example. Often you can find bundles where you get the mic stands, and they throw in a half dozen free XLR cables. Those are always terrible quality, and I know guys who wire their entire stage, and their entire system using that quality of cabling. And you can tell!

Your videos showed up recently in my feed. Ive been enjoying them. Great story about your pirate station in your previous video!Presentation, audio, video structure..all top notch, thanks

man, youre awsome, youre a sponge of information!!! thank you!!! videos are very well made and sound quality is superb!! Interesting stories. Stay legal! :D

Great info and great vid. That cut at 10:07 would probably be a better starting point. The long ass explanation of gates…..dude, your audience knows what a gate is. The quantum microscope explanation of hiss….aye! That was golden.

Excellent set of informations

great overview, reminds me of the time I mistakenly grabbed a non-shielded speaker cable (TS to TS) to plug in my guitar & it instantly started picking up 60 cycle hum & radio signals...proper grounding & shielding are huge factors in noise reduction. Thanks

Solid sound info. Funny, I call the artifact that you get with NR plugins the "metallic warble" lol. You get that same kinda artifact when encoding MP3s at lower bitrates using bad algorithms, especially back in the day.

You will come across some venues that if you tie pin 1 to the shell you will cause ground loops between the “stage” and the control room because of different grounds on different power systems

Hi Barry. If i simply want to record me playing my electronic drums - so an input from the camera, and an input from the audio interface, what free software would i use to create that video?