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Should I remove the cables from my rack-mount boxes, or leave them plugged in 24x7 ? I have a presonus firepod, helicon voiceworks, Roland GI-20, and Boss VF-1.

Will plugging my mic and 1/4" cables in an out every day reduce the life of the jacks ?
How about the 13 pin and 5 pin midi cables ?



A lot of home recordists find that use of a small mixer designed for recording eliminates all the cabling hassles by keeping your basic setup and cabling "normalized" at all times, requiring only bringing up of one fader and turning down another to switch or mix inputs from the various devices.

And, yes, constant plugging and unplugging can cause wear and tear on jacks, I have replaced broken jacks on a regular basis at the electronics repair facility where I try to keep my hand in as a repair tech on a part time basis. Perhaps many more jacks get damaged by people using adaptors in a wrong fashion. For example, using a barrel adaptor that converts 1/4" to 1/8" mini jack or RCA, but using the barrel type that puts a good deal of strain right on the jack rather than spending a little more on an adaptor that has a length of cable attached such that there is only the type of plug needed being supported by the jack. Then there are all those repairs where someone tripped over a hanging cable and the jack gets damaged.

Use of mixer in the home studio, all wired up and labeled, with the cabling neatly arranged or even tied back or to each other, is not only a good idea as far as protecting the equipments you have from problems such as these, it is simply a much faster method of workflow when working with your DAW.

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My desk actually looks nicer when I unplug everything, but I imagine it would be a pain (at least for me) to replace the input/output jacks if they go.



There are available hook and loop cable ties, great for organizing wires and cables by bundling them and these can also be used to tie a cable bundle to a workstation table leg, or in case of a flat surface, combined with those peel and stick nylon cable tie supports.

When the sheer amount of extraneous audio devices may begin to be more than your available number of mixer inputs, it is not always necessary to go to a larger capacity mixer in the home studio. Consider the addition of a Patch Bay or two, one on inputs and one on outputs, these provide a "normalized" signal flow that can be easily interrupted with a 1/4" plug into the right jack. Use the particular goodie on another goodie's channel and when done, merely rempoving the plug returns that channel to its original duty. The Home Recordist qworking by themselves or maybe calling in one other musician at a time has no real need for a huge 24 or 32 channel mixing board since there is not likely to be a scenario where there will be more than a couple or three inputs being used at the same time anyway. A small home recording mixer such as made b Behringer or any number of other companies, is inexpensive and typically also contains at least two channels with Mic Preamps and Phantom Power as well as several Line Inputs for the shelf of goodies. These can also be extended for more normalized goodies with a small Line Mixer to branch out one of the Line Inputs on your main mixer if desired. Most of those kinds of goodies will not benefit from having EQ section anyway, you'd likely just leave any EQ (tone) controls set to 12 o'clock, the "FLAT" setting. The Line Mixer is simple, has only faders for the number of Inputs it has, plus a Master at the end.


--Mac

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