Pros, Please advise me on Cabling :)

[KamaSutra77]

I'm looking to build out a good set of mic cables, around 16 of them. Any good sources for bulk cable and connectors?
Recommendations as far as brand for the cable an connector models? I'm considering Cannare star quad.

Secondly, can I get away with a cheap word clock cable, like Hosa cheap?

Thanks for your advice.

[JFreak]

Just buy Whirlwind or Mogami stuff and be happy. The Whirlwind MK4 mic cables are as good as it is worth being. Mogami is a little more expensive but either are very much worth every penny.

[Drew Mazurek]

Redco Audio does good work. I just installed my D Command and used their D Sub patchbays and they were great. They have a cable builder on their website.

[Tom Pfaeffle]

Redco for custom or raw mogami wire/ gepko makes good wire as well. You may want to consider using 110 ohm digital wire for D-sub connections and mic wire as it can double for both AES/EBU and analog. It's a bit more expensive , but will serve double duty.

[KamaSutra77]

Thanks for the input. Redco looks like a good source.

[Chief Technician]

You may want to consider using 110 ohm digital wire for D-sub connections and mic wire as it can double for both AES/EBU and analog.

This is because the capacitance of a 110 ohm AES/EBU cable is lower than typical microphone cable, and capacitance is the enemy (though I forget the exact reason why at the moment).

[Richard Barrie]

Capacitance in cabling can cause loss of high frequencies and in the case of AES could make the edges of the digital waveform have a slightly longer rise time. StarQuad mic cabling tends to have greater inherent capacitance.

It is rare for AES and analogue D-type connectors to have the same pin numbers so watch out for that.

[toneski]

Hi Everybody,
I don’t know whether I should be drowning my sorrows in a barrel of whisky right now but your advice is needed. I recently purchased a sound booth and I needed to rig up a wiring loom for microphones, instruments, headphones, etc from it to pre-amps within a rack and a mixing desk. I decided to utilise Mogami Starquad cable at great expense as the cables would need to be running past a number of power cords, VDU cables, etc to avoid any possibility of electrical interference, hum, etc. It does have slightly higher capacitance than ordinary Mogami Microphone cable and now I hear on the forum that this might reduce the quality of the signal by attenuating high frequencies. Should I rip out all the Mogami Starquad and utilise ordinary Mogami microphone cable. The length of the cables to the preamp I am using from the Sound booth is 10metres approx, (32 feet approx) and from the sound booth to the mixing desk 12metres approx, (40 feet approx). On the Mogami website capacitance figures are:

Starquad Microphone cable W2534 97pf/metre or 29.6pf/ft – conductor to conductor.

Ordinary Mogami Microphone cable W2549 76pf/metre or 23pf/ft, conductor to conductor.

The preamp I am using at the moment is a Focusrite Red 7, the microphone generally for vocals is a SE Gemini MKII at the moment. All lines are balanced. Going on the Canare website their starquad cable has a capacitance of 150pf/metre(46pf/ft) and they have a chart showing that a 100m starquad cable starts attenuating frequencies above 20khz and then there is a slow drop off to 200khz. So are my starquad cable runs choking high frequencies and effecting my high end and should I replace them again at more expense with ordinary Mogami microphone cabe, (and at the same time give myself a good kick up the backside).

Many thanks for all your help and advice,