Which model FerroFish interface do you have?
If the console and interface are 10-12’ apart I’d use 4-5m snakes of good quality. Even the standard HOSA snakes work well…good quality shielded cable, reliable, and budget-friendly. Maybe you already have snakes, but keep them as reasonably short as possible and you should be fine.
This all holds true assuming you don’t have unusual environmental factors with which to contend. Like, for instance, I used to live a couple blocks from the 2nd highest powered AM radio station in my state. That was an unusual environmental factor, but even at that my unbalanced cable runs were 1-3m and it was fine. I still preferred balanced in that setting because it made it so I could worry less about induced noise interference. And that’s the point…I’m not sure if this is where you’re at, but there’s a general misconception that balanced audio interconnects are “professional” and sound “better” and so everything should be balanced. That’s not true.
Balanced audio started a long, long time ago in the telephone industry. In that case they were obviously dealing with very, very long cable runs. The telephone industry is also what drove the invention of EQ filters due to the capacitive losses impacting the spectral performance over those very, very long cable runs. But the point here is that balanced audio wasn’t developed because it sounded better, outside of mitigating noise interference. That was the reason then and it’s the same reason now. And it should be understood that circuitry that balances and unbalances the signal requires more circuitry, which has its own level of noise and distortion, so, generally-speaking, if it’s not necessary to run balanced interconnects, your signal is more clean if you stay unbalanced. My Tascam 58 manual even supports this…specs for balanced and unbalanced interconnects list better HF performance with the unbalanced interconnects. And it’s not because the circuitry is a bad design…it’s actually, as far as the output drivers go, a decent discrete output stage powered by +/-20V power rails. A caveat I’ll note here is some devices do use transformers to balance and unbalance the signal, vs active circuitry, and transformers can enable desirable artifacts to the signal (like non linearities and harmonic distortion), but there is also a misconception that transformer=better/more desirable sound, and this is not true either. It depends on the system, device drive capability, nominal impedance, and of paramount importance the quality of the transformer, among other things. I would argue very much you get what you pay for, and the lore around transformers is driven by high-eschelon gear. So if you want to chase that down to get what people talk about, it comes at a substantial cost. The other thing to consider is if you are in pursuit of transparent signal, transformer-based circuits are less likely to afford that. Balanced interconnections were adopted by the broadcast and video and audio production industries, but understand it was necessary with air transmission interference, and often large buildings with production equipment spread all over and often hundreds and sometimes thousands of feet of cabling. It’s an absolute necessity in those circumstances to run balanced signal runs. Most audio gear is internally unbalanced. So, if a device has balanced inputs and outputs, the signal is converted to balanced at the outputs, and converted from balanced to unbalanced at the inputs. Some higher echelon gear is balanced throughout. My Studer console is this way. But this is not so with the M-3500 series. Think of balanced audio as two unbalanced parallel signal runs, but one leg is 180 degrees out of phase. Any interference that is induced along the cable run is cancelled out when the two runs are summed at the input, and the out-of-phase leg is inverted as it is summed with the in-phase leg. But this now puts the noise interference signals out of phase with each other and the noise is cancelled out; noise gone. And by “noise” understand we are talking about induced noise…noise that’s picked up by the signal run along the way. We are not talking about system self-noise. Balanced interconnections do nothing to mitigate noise generated by your audio devices themselves. If the runs are short and the cable is good quality shielded cable, the area for interference to be induced is relatively small, and what is induced is picked up by the shield and not the signal conductor, and the noise is ideally shunted to ground at either the input or output end of the run (or maybe both…it depends on the setup…this is where we start getting into a more complex subject of grounding in audio systems, which we hope to avoid unless we have a problem).
I know this is a lot of info, but I like to share it occasionally, especially if it helps people take some pressure (and unnecessary expense!) off of themselves, hopefully understanding that they don’t have to knock themselves out trying to keep everything balanced!
