Answered Camcorder XLR audio

Flash888

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Hi

I have a Canon XA20 and a Rode NTG1 mic. I'm looking to buy an XLR cable to be able to connect the mic to the camcorder and I was wondering if somebody who knows could kindly shed some light on whether I need an analogue (75 ohm) or digital AES/EBU (110 ohm) XLR cable.

Thanks in advance.
 
It will be analogue, as you are not passing digital data, but a low-level balanced audio signal from the mic to the camera's mic input. That is, the signal has not yet been digitised and is still in the analogue domain.

Dan.
 
75 Ohm cables are normally unbalanced, 110 ohm are balanced . The NTG1 has a balanced output, so you would need a balanced XLR cable for the best results.

In reality, cable impedances are not critical for audio applications.... What is important is the balanced output.
Incidentally the NTG1 has a nominal output impedance of 50 Ohms, so it really doesn't care whether the connecting cable is 75 or 110 Ohms! :)

It does care that the XLR cable is balanced....
 
For analogue audio, the impedance of the cable itself is immaterial, but I think that the "weave" of the shielding around the twisted pair, (or twisted quads in the case of some of the cables available from Canare), is different between "audio" and "digital" cables. I suspect that the weave of the shielding in audio cable will be tighter/higher coverage.

Dan.
 
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That makes perfect sense, thanks. I was intending to buy a balanced cable & understand all about the difference there, I was looking at Van Damme cables today and came across this and it got me thinking... but if I think about the audio signal starting from the mic end as dosdan explained then it makes sense that it's analogue. Cheers!
 

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