Q: I’m building a studio, and I want to be able to play guitar in the control room while the amps are located quite a ways away in a soundproof amp room. Can I just run the guitar cable that far (about 50 feet) or do I need something else?
A: It’s generally not a good idea to run unbalanced cables (guitar and bass cables, for example) farther than 30 feet – we recommend keeping them under 20 feet for least signal loss and degradation. To run unbalanced cables farther than 20 or 30 feet, the solution is to convert them to balanced lines at the guitar end and back to unbalanced at the amp end. There are a variety of ways to accomplish this; we recommend the Radial Engineering SGI (Studio Guitar Interface) as an ideal solution; it lets you make cable runs up to 300 feet using standard mic-style XLR cables.
