Do I need balanced cables for this? I probably will need 50' cables. This is a charity event that will have speech and music coming off the PA/Sound board. Thanks!

Do I need balanced cables for this? I probably will need 50' cables. This is a charity event that will have speech and music coming off the PA/Sound board. Thanks!

You need to find out what the board is putting out - some are one, some are the other, some are both. <g> The board might give you an XLR to plug into, or it might be 1/4 TRS balanced, 1/4 TS unbalanced, or even RCA unbalanced. Need to find out what equipment is at both ends of the cable to know for sure. If you have choice, balanced is better for better immunity to noise.

It's also a good idea to have "turnarounds" (sex changers) with you in case the board needs a female plug and your cable is a male... :-)

Thanks for the tips guys! I'm just going to order the balanced cable.....and some Ru Pauls ;)

it depends how often you need to do things like this...

i do feeds off of sound boards pretty often so what i almost always use is a wireless setup so i'm free of a long cable for everyone there to trip over.

it also greatly frees up where you can setup the camera.

i use the sennheiser stuff and the g2 series is a good setup for the money.

the specific piece you need to do this would be the plug on transmitter.

it comes in both the phantom powered and non phantom powered versions.

for what you are doing you certainly don't need to spend the extra $ for the phantom version, plus if you have the phantom version and it should accidently end up with the phantom power turned on it can wreak havoc with the sound board.

matthew