Understand the Cables Used in Audio Recording

Video Transcript

On behalf of Expert Village, Kurt Glaser, KGB Studios, Seattle. Let's continue now with our sessions on "How to use a Two Track Reel to Reel Tape Recorder". In this session we're going to be talking a lot about the types of cables that are used in audio recording. We discussed, briefly, about balanced and unbalanced. This is an important piece. These are typically balanced cables. I like to use the side profiles and so that you can see what the cables are. This would be the female, and this would be the male. And these are called "XLR". XLR type, most of the microphones that you use these days use XLR cables. They are a three conductor, it means there are three wires in them, and they go to the one, two, and three pins here. They work very well, they're very quiet and you can run a very long distance because they are a low. Remember you want to get and understand the difference between high impedance and low impedance. This has the same type of connectors as this one, but it has an ending which is a quarter inch. I use stereo, balanced, so that I have ground as well as these going into the tape deck over here, because I want to have very, very quiet sound. I don't want to have noise. Grounding, of course, is another piece, and those are used in these XLR connectors. So this is an XLR to a quarter inch male. These would be perfect for our reel to reel because we have those quarter inch openings there in the deck. Also we have, if you have like a instrument of bass, electric guitar, an acoustic guitar with a pick-up, and you're not using microphones, you want to be able to stay very, very quiet. These types of cables, again, these are guitar chords again, quarter inch, and these are mono. You probably can't see these, but there's only one separator there, so those are mono. Also, if you have like an adapter type of thing, remember when we were talking about the headphones before, this I bought for adapting the headphones if I want to do private listing, but I'm far away from my reel to reel, I'll use this adapter. This goes to my normal CD headphones, and this is, of course, the quarter inch stereo jack. So an extender, I buy those. Here's a longer one where I can get a long, long way if I'm real far away, like to the drummer, same type of cable. And then of course for connecting all sorts of things. These are used in all manner of connections. These are called RCA males, and we talked about in the back of the deck. There are two types, there's the ones that are kind of chrome plated, there's our brass plated, and then the most expensive ones are gold plated. Red for right, remember that? Red for right. And then we have a basic type of an adapter that goes from this style, (I'll put these other ones down here), but it goes from this style here to a small, mini stereo. If you have a small mini jack on your reel to reel deck. Most are quarter inch, however. So join us next time.

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