Current recording engineers - what cables used?

@chrisr

Here is a video of the setup

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UqP32CeQuUw

It is a 100 foot Victorian houseboat. Van den hul make similar excellent microphone wires like Canare - in a starquad configuration for low noise. Of course they needed very long runs of high quality (low noise) cable to wire up all the rooms. A microphone has a very small output. These are not line level signals like you use in your home consumer stereo.

Noise from power is a common problem in studios - often electrical is run above and drops down - this is to keep electrical away from microphone level cables. When they turned the houseboat into a studio no doubt they should have done the electrical wiring again... hundreds of feet and microphone level signals present challenges.

Sweet set-up. Thanks! for sharing- shadorne
Happy Listening!

Thank you Shadorne.

All, thanks again for your input.  Not sensing overwhelming participation in this thread by active recording and mastering engineers, but perhaps they are not generally on this forum.

@shadorne , thanks for sharing video of studio so well described in the interview.  Very interesting.

@chrisr , I am going to take a wild guess that: 1. Many of the cable runs in David Gilmour’s studio (or any pro studio) are long, 2. That they are not all long, and 3. That the engineers use high quality cable for each application regardless of length because each are important and they believe based on their (exhaustive) testing that using better cables yields better results. (I mean really, changing directionality of the earth ground noticeably affects the sound of all other gear!?!)

My own experience (with only 0.06km of total cable length of all kinds in my main system) is that even changing out a 0.5m interconnect can have a favorable or unfavorable effect on sound.  This because as I have stated previously elsewhere, one of the important functions of good cables is to protect signals from stray electrical fields in the environment behind your rack, and the most polluted area is the square foot behind your gear where digital, power and low level and high level signals are all converging. In a pro studio, this electrical mayhem may be prevelant everywhere, but in your home it is at least occurring or likely to occur without adequate preventive measures at the back of your gear - so your wires better perform well in that environment.

And so, my take is sure, you want to protect and maintain signal integrity and linearity across frequency and time domains in cables, and long runs present a particular challenge all other things equal. But in especially “dirty” electrical environments you need to protect signals in even short runs AND THEIR CONNECTIONS. These latter challenges are faced by both pro studios and audiophiles, wherever cables of various types come into close proximity, REGARDLESS OF OVERALL LENGTH.

Another interesting takeaway from the interview @maplegrovemusic posted is that according to the studio manager, digital cables matter a lot.  This is a subject of special torture well down the lower rungs of cable forum hell here on Agon, and it is interesting to read where some especially compulsive engineers make the claim that digital cables and data transfer are an important, perhaps even critical, part of the overall recording process. I may share the link to this interview elsewhere on the forum just to stir the pot and see what bubbles up.