Tools Needed for Audio Cable Repair

Series Summary

If you've ever ran sound or worked as a sound engineer before, you probably have had to deal with audio cables malfunctioning. Audio and sound cables are essential to any sound system whether it be for live sound, recording, or being a DJ. In sound engineering, typically the first thing to break are cables, so knowing how to repair audio cables is an important skill for any sound tech to know, so let an expert teach you how it's done.

In this free video series, watch as professional sound engineer Kip Bradford teaches how to make and repair audio cables. Learn the tools needed to repair and make audio cables, learn what kind of solder to use, learn the types of connectors and wires to use, how to solder audio cables, how to remove solder from a solder joint, and how to roll audio cables.

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Kip and I am here today on behalf of Expert Village. Today we are going to talk about building, troubleshooting and repairing your own audio cables, microphone cables and etc. The first thing we are going to do is take a look at the tools that you will need to do this work. You will need a soldering iron. If you are not going to do lots and lots of your own work, you can get one that does not have this power base and it is just a handle like this. You can get them with variable heat control knob here or without but you want to get a decent quality one that will do this work. Having variable temperature control in this workstation makes one, a nice place to put your soldering iron when it is hot and two, you can control the temperature very precisely for different kinds of work. For making audio connections, it is not near as important to have very precise control over heat as it would be if you were working on circuits boards where overheating a component can damage it quite easily. You will need a moistened sponge. The moistened sponge we use to clean the tip of our soldering iron. You will need some wire cutters, you will resin corde solder and some form of wire strippers. This has a crimper and everything involved but this is what we would use as the wire stripper. It is nice to have some way to remove the solder from the old joint. This is a sucking type soldering removing process or we have this braided type. Another tool that I built myself would be this clamp; whereas you don't have to have a clamp like this and it is very simple clamp. I put a couple of pieces of weather stripping and I put pieces of metal and some springs and this is the first one I built. I have a better one that I keep in my case that has stiffer springs. It is nice to be able to hold your connector while you work on it and one size fits all this way. Other than the wires and the connectors, these are all the tools that you will need to get started building your own audio cables and repairing them. "