<<The wire arrangement in star quad cables is superior for rejecting magnetic
field interference (when wired properly mono), but I don't think it has much
effect on radio pickup. Mics wired stereo through star quad are still balanced
lines. I'm not denying your experience, but I'm skeptical about your
attributing it to the "off label" use of star quad cable.>>
That's the problem with something like this, correlating cause to effect. There
are certainly many variables available & unfortunately one can't use a client's
time to experiment.
<<I suspect your interference problem might rather have been what engineers are
calling "the pin 1 problem," where the cable shield at the preamp input is
wired to the circuit board ground, rather than directly to the chassis as is
current practice. The pin 1 problem causes radio interference to be re-radiated
inside the equipment. Another possibility is that you were close to a
transmitter, a situation that often no manner of wiring can remedy.>>
It's been too long to recall all the circumstances, but that combination of mic
& preamp was good when using other cables, though I've moved on to much better
preamps since. It perhaps is a leap to a conclusion, but the cable appears to
be the one variable leading to the bad results. I currently use the 5 pin XLR
fanouts I made for that cable with my Mogami 2 pair cables, so I know they're
OK.
<<Of course RF problems are notorious for being sensitive to location,
geometry, and even weather, and thus are hard to reproduce or pin down.>>
For all I know there was an impurity in one bit of solder which resulted in
demodulating the radio. Or perhaps a campus radio station on top of the
building, modulating the mains. It could be that a transformer based preamp
would have fixed the issue. (I have had radio breakthrough with a different set
of Neumann TLM mics & a very high end preamp at the late Plant facility in
Sausalito, so I try to mix & match source & destination carefully.) Perhaps
swapping which white lead pairs with a given blue lead may have worked better,
I don't know, & didn't really care to test differing hypotheses at that point.
But the fact is, on at least two paying jobs I had a problem which appeared to
arrive & then depart with the use of that Star Quad 100' cable wired for
stereo. Twice bitten, thrice shy. I subsequently cut it into 25' lengths, wired
mono, & have used them on hundreds of album releases since then.
Scott Fraser
"While a picture is worth a thousand words, a
sound is worth a thousand pictures." R. Murray Schafer via Bernie Krause.
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