How to Test Audio Cables

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Kip Bradford and I am here on behalf of Expert Village. In this clip, we are going to look at the different ways that we can test cabling just to see if it has been soldered properly and two, if it might have a problem in terms of troubleshooting. These are the two most common ways to test cabling. This is the simplest way which is a device and many companies make this type of a thing which is a cable tester. You plug your XLR into this end and this end and a series of lights will tell you if the pins have been soldered to the right connection, if you are not getting continuity through one of the conductors or more and so forth and it gives you the ability to use several different kinds of connectors. We have XLR, we have quarter inch, non-balanced and balanced, we can test midi cables, we can test RCA cables and it is just a very handy device. Now the multimeter has a read out here and of course you can check voltages, both AC and DC. This one you can check temperatures of things and a whole lot of different things. On a multimeter, you will usually find up near the top here a little horseshoe shaped symbol and that is a symbol for ohms and ohms are what we measure in electronics to see how much resistance we have in the cable. So we would turn our knobs to the ohms. So if you set the dial to the horseshoe shaped symbol which is a symbol for ohms and this can test the impedance of a cable. So if you just take the test probes and put them together, you will get 000 which is infinitive which means we have a connection and we essentially have very little if any resistance. We will always have some but we are not measuring it here. So if we get an XLR cable, we can take and we know the center pin and I will just insert one probe into the center pin and we will take the other probe and on the male side reach in here and touch the center pin and we should get 0 ohms and we do. We know that the center to the center or the number 2 pin is properly connected. Remember we male and female sit back to back. If we go into the number 1, we have to go to the same side if we are holding this way and if we are holding back to back, the opposite side and we will touch here and we know that we have a proper connection. Now we will go ahead and do the other one, so this cable is good. "