Additional Equipment

Leads and Connectors

Unbalanced vs Balanced

There are many types of leads available to musicians and technicians for
directing audio signals to and from audio transducers such as
microphones, guitar pickups and speakers. The most popular types for
analog audio, are the XLR lead (balanced), and the jack lead (unbalanced),
typically 1/4-inch or 3.5mm in size. Guitars and amplifiers tend to use
mono 1/4-inch jack leads, whereas 3.5mm are used largely in laptops and
mobile devices. However, all can be separated into just two types of lead,
unbalanced and balanced. We know that XLR leads are balanced and Jack
leads are unbalanced, but what does this actually mean?

An unbalanced lead can be stereo or mono, carrying either one audio

signal, or two separate audio signals, one for the left channel and one for
the right. If the lead is too long then the signal to noise ratio (SNR) will be
very poor, and the audio will be of low quality.

Balanced 3-pin XLR leads, are mono but carry two almost identical signals.
They are identical in every way other than one is the inverse of the other
(meaning it's been flipped vertically). The waves are 180 degrees out of
phase and so cancel each other out entirely. These 2 signals travel down
the cable, with the audio having increasing amounts noise the further the
signal travel. Now, the audio as it is, would be completely useless to us as
the signals have been completely cancelled out and we've just been left
with the noise in each signal wire. However, it's what happens at the end
of the cable that makes balanced cables so useful to us. When the audio
reaches the end of the cable, one of the signals is flipped back in phase
again, making the sound audible again, and at the same time flipping the
noise that was acquired in that wire out of phase, and so we are left with a
very clean signal with little to none of the noise we would have in an
unbalanced wire of the same length. A diagram to help visualize this:
Connectors

The most common XLR leads (ones used with most microphones) have a
3-pin XLR connector which has three terminals. The two types of XLR
connector are male, and female, with one found on each end of an XLR
cable. Each of the three pins/terminals is labelled with a number, 1-3, that
tells us which of the three wires it is connected to inside the cable. Pin 1 is
connected to ground, pin 2 is connected to positive "hot" terminal, and pin
3 to the negative "cold" terminal. XLR leads are
balanced.

Jack connectors are separated into 3 types, TS,

TRS, and TRRS. This code helps to identify
application for the jack lead, and the
corresponding terminals on each of its
connectors. Each of the letters represents a
terminal on the connector, the letter T is for tip, R
is for ring, and S is for sleeve. So a TS connector,
for example, has just two terminals which are
connected to the tip and the sleeve of the
connector, whereas a TRRS connector has four
terminals connected to the tip, sleeve and two rings on the connector. Jack
leads are unbalanced.