Last week I walked into a friends recording session to hang out and listen. The guitarist was showing me some of his boutique amplifiers and guitars when he plugged in only to showcase terrible buzz & hum coming from his rig! We were both caught by surprise and immediately started started troubleshooting some of the common causes, such as bad connector or an A/C power source radiating too much EMI near by. I unscrewed one of the 1/4″ connectors on his “guitar”cable to see if we had a loose solder joint but instead found he was using a speaker cable. Unscrewing the 1/4″ barrel relieved a twisted pair of conductors with no shield (typical of a speaker cable), rather than once center conductor and shield you’d find on an instrument/guitar cable. We quickly swapped out the cable with a proper instrument cable, and walla, beautiful tone with no noise!
This incident let me to think, using the proper type of 1/4″ cable whether it be for an instrument or speaker run is incredibly important and often doesn’t get the weight and attention it deserves while troubleshooting problems. In this post we’ll discuss why you should only use speaker cables for speakers and instrument cables for instruments.
A quick background in cable anatomy:
Instrument cables are made of a single small gauge center conductor (usually copper) then surrounded by an insulator. The insulator is covered by a braided or foil shield (used as a second conductor) which is then encased in a rubber or plastic outer jacket. The picture below gives you a visual representation of this:
Instrument Cable Anatomy
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