I hate cables, any tricks to reduce them?

...without the scissors?
I mean will there be times everything is wireless?
but then we all die from radiation....

jhughs


Well, it's not much help, but that is what Bluetooth was about.

but somehow none of audio interfaces or instruments feature bluetooth right?

Or perhaps cord connections to a near wall and inside the wall and out again with another cord connection to where it is suppose to go, I guess. Sounds too involved though for me.

Buy more software.

I hate cables too.  All my recording guitars in the house are wireless - mainly because I have kids and I can't afford to have a bunch of cables on the ground - but it makes things very conveinient.

Bluetooth is a problem - I tried a bluetooth mouse and found that it glitched Sonar A LOT.  After researching I found that bluetooth interrupts the CPU.  Wireless USB on the other hand, does not interrupt the CPU.  So for now, wireless USB is much better for audio than bluetooth.

Line6 makes a great wireless system with no loss of signal - you may want to try that.

I took my cue from my background in large computer systems, where you cannot even imagine the cable mess that's hidden under raised floors, above drop ceilings and inside equipment racks. The key is bundling like-signal cables, either with wire-ties or in flexible conduit.

Go down to a well-stocked hardware store and you can find plastic cable conduits that are split down their length so you can have cables entering and exiting them at any point. The conduits can then be wire-tied to equipment racks or whatever, resulting in a tidy setup where cables don't get underfoot or look messy. 

My two primary keyboards normally sit next to the equipment rack but sometimes get taken out for gigs. So all the cables (2 audio, 2 midi, 1 s/pdif, and foot pedal for one, 2 audio, 2 midi and footswitch for the other) are routed through two conduits; when it comes time to set up at home again, I don't have to find each cable and figure out which MIDI cable is for which instrument because they're all bundled together.

While you're at the hardware store, if it has a garden-supply section look for a roll of the velcro-like tape that they sell for tying up tomato plants. It's cheap, you can cut it to length with scissors, and it's more convenient for tying cables together than nylon wire-ties. I use these a lot. Even for tomatoes.

One caveat: don't put power and signal cables in the same conduit. Audio, MIDI and digital can all coexist in close proximity, but power cables should follow a separate route. There is no problem bundling multiple power cables together, though.

Regarding power and audio cables... Back in my live sound days we were setting up various concert stages for the state fair. We got there nice and early and ran all our lines to/from the stages to the various mixers. We kept them out of the way of everything and made sure it was all nice and tidy. Next day we came in and found out on one of the stages that the lighting guys had come in after us and run all their power cables right along side our audio lines. Fired up the system and BUZZZZZZZ! I don't miss those days.