You might think this post is secretly sponsored by some pharmaceutical company. It’s not. Keeping the stage clean looking and the cables organized has much less to do with obsessive compulsive disorder, and much more to do with professionalism.

Does you stage stay set up week to week? Is it a pain if your church has a wedding and you need to strike the stage and set it back up before Sunday? Perhaps you meet in a gym or another site that requires you bring in and set up your entire system each week.

I just came across this website and wanted to pass it along! Balanced cables. Unbalanced. Tip-Ring-Sleeve. XLR. Quarter inch… It can be really confusing. Start throwing in RCA cables, iPods, DVD recorders, and it’s enough to make your head hurt.

The basic idea is that you should use balanced cables as often as you can, especially for longer runs. Any interference that penetrates the cable will still be rejected, even if it gets past the shield. (How that works is so cool. I’ll save it for a future post though). Note that if your signal is going from an unbalanced output (iPod) to a balanced input (XLR input), DO NOT connect anything to pin 3 (the negative connection) on the XLR.

There are 3 types of cables we are going to talk about, and when to use them. Unfortunately, you can’t always tell what type of cable you have just by the connector on the end (XLR, 1/4 inch, etc.), but most connectors have a sleeve that unscrews quickly giving you access to see how the wires are connected to the end so you can figure it out. We will cover 3 generic types of cables: microphone, instrument, and speaker cables. Using the correct cable for appropriate applications will help eliminate 99% of possible buzz and hum, and in some cases make the system safer to operate.