Mogami cable is one of the more highly regarded brands in the pro audio industry. And while I’m not too hung up on labels and such, it seems in this case there *is* a difference. I had been running unshielded cable to the surround system in my studio, which was fine for my previous location. But now I’m in Studio City, which is a noisier environment – both acoustically and electronically.

Not only did I have to build a special window soffit to block out street noise *and* ventilate the machine room I had built in the adjacent closet, but I also soon realized that I would have the “pleasure” of hearing all of the chatter from the LAPD police helicopter bleed into my monitors when it flew overhead (I live near the intersection of the 101, 132 and 170, and there’s often a car chase or crash scene they’re checking out). I also know that there’s a call coming into my cell phone 5 seconds before it actually rings because the sync-up between the cell tower and my phone creates some really “interesting” intermodulation distortion that sounds like an old phone modem connecting to an internet service, 1980s-style. Not good, particularly when you’re sitting in front of the console doing an mix review session with a director. So now it’s time to find a cable that is able to soak up some of that noise and drain it to ground before hit hits my speakers.

I went to my favorite electronics shop in LA – Electronic City in Burbank – to find some shielded cable. They showed me a few options, including several sizes of Mogami cable. I was happy to find that it was not only plentiful, but reasonably cheap as well (I paid about $.61 per running foot). So I came back to the studio with a spool of wire and set about to re-wire (and re-dress, for looks) everything in the studio, starting with the surround monitors. I had to custom build a ground plane to sink all of the shielding for each set of wires on the amplifier. Instead of doing all of it at once I decided to just wire up the speaker that seemed to catch the most interference. Unfortunately it didn’t kill *all* of the cell phone noise, but it is greatly reduced. I have a few other tricks to try to get the rest of the noise out of the sound field, but I have a feeling that I’ll need to upgrade the actual amplifer and speakers (to something with much better internal sheilding – which means much more $$$$) in order for it to completely go away. Such as it is – is *does* sound better, so I guess in this case name brand/reputation *does* matter.