Sound Engineering and Music Production blog #10

Hello, Steemians! Let's continue with our previous discussion on Cables. Let's call it Cables: part 2. So, today I'm gonna tell you about Digital Cables. Digitization in audio industry demanded the use of various cables. Different cables were used for different purposes. I'll write about a few of them today. So, let's get started.

1. Interface cables:
These cables are used to connect audio interfaces, DSP accelerators etc. with the PC/Laptop. mainly 3 types of cables are used for this purpose.

a] USB cable: We all know about this cable as it is widely used. This cable has the least data transfer speed amongst the 3 cables.
b] Firewire: It offers significantly higher speed than USB but it needs to be handled with care since it's connectors are too sensitive and are damaged easily.
c] Thunderbolt: Newer technology that offers the highest data transfer speed. Thunderbolt technology is used by all the top end digital audio gear.

2. Optical cables:
Also called Lightpipe cables, optical cables can carry multiple channels of digital audio via a single cable.

ADAT cable and TOSlink cable are examples of optical cables. ADAT can carry 8 channels whereas S/PDIF or TOSlink carries 2 channels of audio.

3. CAT5 cables:
These are the same cables used with Landline Telephones. Ability of these cables to carry power and audio simultaneously is very useful for the audio industry. It carries multiple channels over a long distance with very low latency. Some advanced systems can send up to 40 channels of audio using just a single CAT5e cable.

4. BNC Cables:
These are co-axial cables used to connect various digital equipment with the word clock device used to keep them in sync. This is done in order to avoid misaligned samples and annoying clicks and pops in the audio. Simple studios might not use a word clock device but advanced studios with advanced signal routing require them.

That's a brief information about cables from my side. You can read about these cables in detail on Wikipedia.
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Thank you.