Why are speaker cables unbalanced?
Unbalanced cables have significantly more signal loss than a balanced cable, so why are speaker cables unbalanced?
In general, it’s best to use unbalanced cables less than 20ft with guitars, basses, keyboards, or anything else with an instrument-level output. By the time the signal travels to the end of a long (25’ or more) unbalanced cable, it’s so weak that it may end up sounding noisy. However, with speaker cables, the signal has been amplified by all the gain stages in the mixer and power amp. Power amps make the signal much larger than the signal which goes through an instrument cable.
Compared to how much we’re amplifying the signal, the amount of noise in a 20’ unbalanced cable is roughly the same as a 50’ cable. That means there’s much more signal but approximately the same amount of noise inside a speaker cable. By the time signal gets to a speaker cable, the signal to noise ratio is much better than when it was at instrument level that we don’t have to worry about signal loss over long cable runs.
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