Custom Balanced XLR Cables

January 13, 2023

So I get up this morning, all motivated to go downstairs after breakfast and start playing and maybe even make a little video… but no. Seems that Mother Nature had a plan for me today… to shovel snow, LOTS of snow. My area in Quebec was officially under a weather warning and snow was a part of it.

So, I had myself a nice breakfast, got dressed in the appropriate winter attire and went to do battle with the elements. Ugh, it was wet HEAVY snow!

I cleared out our driveway, and then worked on the car. I then drove over to my sister’s and we worked on her driveway and by the time I get back home, our driveway needed to be done again.

This was a very unfair triple-play Mother Nature! 🙂

My body was sore from the half day of exertions, but I still wanted to do something… anything hobby related, so I made myself some balanced XLR cables of a custom length so that I don’t need to use 25-foot cables to connect my QSC mixer to my little ZOOM F4 recorder when doing live streaming when only 4.5 feet was long enough.

So I broke out the soldering iron, solder and all the rest of my tools, measured off the length of wire I needed, added a few more inches to avoid any possible binding and off I went downstairs to make the cables.

Definitely not a long job, but it was fun. Good thing it did not take long, my back started to seize up near the end and I definitely should have taken some more time to rest (note to self: Don’t hunch over when soldering cables!)

I ran upstairs to get my cellphone, ran back down to take a couple of pics and carried up the cables to insert at least one end in to the Zoom F4 recorder.

I enjoy these kinds of small projects, they’re always fun and I really like to have things setup and ready to use… that makes me happy and now my ZOOM F4 recorder is ready for action as an audio interface anytime I need and want it for live streaming!

Enjoy!