Cables

Can you imagine? You’re about to perform on stage and suddenly your signal drops out because the cable broke. Fortunately, every gigging musician’s worst nightmare can be easily avoided. Here’s five tips for preventing cable breakage.

As soon as you start working with cables, you run the risk of cooking up cable spaghetti. To help you organise your set-up, we’ve listed five cable management tips. Dive in before you tie yourself up in knots.

Unfortunately, there comes a time when everything breaks, and the same is definitely true of music gear, whether it’s speakers, valve amplifiers, or your electric guitar or bass. In the worst case, you’ll need to get it fixed by a professional, but there are some smaller, more simple repairs that you can actually carry out yourself. With a voltmeter, a soldering iron and a little solder on your side, you can get more done than you might think.

Gaffer tape or duct tape? Line up a few rolls of each and you won’t be able to tell the difference but as soon as you get them in your hands, you’ll immediately know which is which. This isn’t much of a surprise since they are in fact completely different things. So, while duct tape is known for being able to fix any of the world’s problems, why is it that lighting and sound technicians turn to gaffer tape instead? We explain all in this little slip of a blog!

When you decide to upgrade your lighting set-up with a DMX controller, you’re going to need the right cables. And as a quick Google search will tell you, it’s all about two cables: DMX, and XLR cables. Here, we’ll explain the difference between both, and help you decide which one you need when, and where.

While setting up a bunch of audio gear for a venue or studio, you’re going to come across balanced and unbalanced cables. But, what exactly is the difference between these so-called symmetrical and a-symmetrical connections? What kind of plugs do you need to use and are balanced cables pretty much the same as stereo-cables? All of these nagging questions shall be answered in the following blog.

Hooking up audio equipment such as mixers, amplifiers, DJ controllers and even smartphones to your speakers looks deceivingly simple. But why does speaker A only come with a ‘SpeakON’ connector while speaker B is packed with numerous, exciting connection options? And which cable is the right one? RCA, XLR, TRS? In this blog, we’ll show you a number of different setups and explain exactly how to get it all working properly. We’ll start small and work our way up to more complex setups.

Some of the most frequently-asked questions we get here at Bax Music are about connecting studio monitors. “Which cables do I use to connect a set of studio monitors to a laptop or PC? Which cables do I need to hook my DJ controller up to my monitors? Why do I need an audio interface, and how do I connect it to my studio monitors?” In this blog, we’ll take you through some examples using a set of active studio monitors, which have a built-in amplifier.

Whether you’re looking for signal, speaker or power cables, the thickness and length are inextricably linked. In this blog, we’ll provide some information about cables and how they work. We’ll also give you a simple way to work out which thickness of speaker cable you need for an optimal signal.