Midi Cables

The Moog Forum Moog Music General Topics Forum
1

Here’s a little something that might help some of you out.

I have 2 midi interfaces as well as an old MX-8 made by Digital Music Corp. All 3 units allow you to “test” your midi cables. They all work pretty much the same. You plug in both ends and you get either a lit LED indicating a good cable or not lit for a bad one.

Fine. I’ve been using any one of these units for years to diagnose my midi cables. But as of late, I’ve been having some trouble with my rig in the department of midi - problems I’ve not been able to solve. As things cropped up, I’d simply find some sort of work-around to temporarily get me by.

I had my cable case at home recently and decided to go through all of my cables once and for all and weed out all of the bad ones, audio and midi. I didn’t have any of my interfaces handy, so I sought out and bought a little device to help me out with the task.

80% of my midi cables were bad. And here’s why…

The interfaces and the old MX-8 patch bay test each of the five pins from end to end for a good connection, a test where just about ALL of my cables passed with flying colors. HOWEVER - what didn’t show up in that method of testing was that most of my old cables had CROSS CONNECTIONS occurring. Only the new tester I bought showed this to be so.

The tester I purchased was a SM Pro Audio CT2 Cable Tester. With this unit, you set a selector switch in each of 5 positions - one for each pin. A series of LEDs show not only the connection from end to end, but show any cross connections as well. This particular unit has connections for just about any connection that a musician could need.

Guys, I highly recommend this tester and suggest that you go through all of your cables. It sells for just over 20 bucks and is the best investment I’ve made in a long time. It’s a solid unit too - you can probably drive a truck over it and it would probably come through unscathed.

2

Interesting topic. I’m curious about your MIDI cables that tested bad due to cross connections. As you probably know, only the “middle” 3 pins (2,4,5) are required for MIDI. If the “far left” or “far right” pins were cross connected (if that was the case), it shouldn’t matter.

That said, I had an ancient home made MIDI cable that would not work with my new UC33e knob/slider box. Yet this old cable worked with all my other MIDI devices. I took off the plug barrel and saw that all 5 pins were wired. When I tried a different MIDI cable that used just the middle 3 pins the UC33 was happy. Don’t know if this is relevant to your investigation…

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I don’t think it matters much because most of them were lit up like a Christmas tree.

Interesting about the UC33e. I wonder if the engineers utilized one of the outside pins even just for some sort of grounding. Perhaps it would be interesting to ask the guys at Evolution if they can explain it.

CB