Ferrite - or leave it?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Ferrite - or leave it?

Hi folks,

is it by any chance possible that a MIDI controller (i.e. Akai LPD-8) causes problems when connected with a USB cable with a ferrit beak? In other words, could certain hardware need ferritless cables?

I’ve got some basic knowledge about electronics, but this specific HF sruff is definitely beyond my scope. Any specialist, here?

Thanks in advance,
tom

2

You mean a Ferrite Clamp/Bead, right?

I’ve had a bunch of 'em on my desk for a while, but never put 'em onto my midi cables. If it ain’t broke - don’t fix it, right?

3

not sure but the cable that came with my s4 had one and started acting really weird after a month. switched to a a plain old usb cable i had laying around and the problem was gone.

4

Yes. Sounds a lot like my problem. The only difference is that the LPD-8 came with a (cheap) cable without ferrit bead. It acted sporadicallx weird, so I replaced the cable by a high quality one with ferrite - which seemed to make things even worse.
Using another cable, without ferrite I experienced no problems, though I could not find any technical argument against ferrite beads anywhere. Weird…
Hmm… maybe the ferrite beak of the replacement cable is damaged, ferrite has no metal grid and is very easx to break which would definitely disturb its magnetic field. Can’t think of any other reason…

5

ferrite beads are supposed to make the usb cable work better. its supposed to filter out noise, although i never really noticed a difference between ferrite/non-ferrite. maybe the particular cable you were using was bad?

6

That’s exactly what I think. I seem to have replaced a broken cable with another broken cable.

7

sorry, had to change the title, it was bugging me :wink:
ferrites all the way.

8

My LPD-8’s both came with ferrite beaded cables… I use them with very little problems… there is one thing I have noticed, and this might be a Traktor bug: Many times when I leave my home studio and setup for a gig, the top right midi-knob I have mapped to FX bank 2 - effect parameter 3 - looses the mapping and I have to ‘re-learn’ it… what’s weird is that when I return to my home studio and setup it doesn’t loose the mapping.