Every so often, I’ll either get the explicit question of “where do you want the coils?” or I’ll work with someone who has a different concept of it than I do, and I have to make my preference known.

And, of course, I have a ready answer to where one ought to put those (hopefully) neatly-wound excesses of XLR, TRS, power, and whatever other cable we might have at work. “Put ’em at the mic stands and monitor wedges they belong to,” says I, and off we go towards another evening of music. But what’s the logic? How might we generalize the concept?

Well, first, we don’t want a big, messy pile of excess cable that we can’t sort through easily. (If there’s a connection failure or a mis-patch, this can become a major factor in solving the problem quickly.) Second, we want to be able to re-arrange the stage with the greatest ease possible.

Those needs work out to a pretty simple demand: That coils of excess cable ought to be arranged in a distributed manner, away from any common termination point, and as near to the distributed termination point as safety, functionality, and aesthetics allow. Whether the cable is being used for input or output is immaterial.

In the case of an input-side run (for a mic or DI box, say), this means that the excess is coiled near the bottom of the mic stand, or next to the DI. This distributes the excess away from the stage box (the common termination point), and puts it near the mic or DI, which is the distributed termination point.

For an output-side run, like to monitors or main loudspeakers, the coil should sit at the side or back of the loudspeaker – whichever is less obstructive to controls and patch points – because the loudspeaker is the distributed termination point. For stick-mounted loudspeakers, it’s the same as mics on stands: Put the coil on the ground, near the stand.

Having the coils at the distributed termination points makes those items easier to move. Because the cable “feed” is close to the object being set in a different place, the rest of the cable run, and the other cable runs near it, can be relatively undisturbed by that move. This is a BIG help when you’ve got a lot of cable on the deck. If you do things the other way, feeding more cable to get to a more distant location means a lot more disruption of all the other cable. Plus, if the big pile of cable gets tangled (and you know it will), you may not be able to pull more length easily. Distributed coils stop the big-tangled-pile problem from even starting, as your feed point for more length is already away from everything else.

Further, by keeping the coils separate and therefore “readable” in terms of what they belong to, problems are easier to fix. When all the cable piles up at the stagebox, replacing a bad line or fixing a patch that’s in the wrong spot is a chore. You have to sort out which cable is the right one in a giant ocean of samey spaghetti, and then try to make your fix without turning the whole pile into an even bigger mess. With a distributed approach, it’s much easier to follow a line from the coil to the patch point. The separation between cables is far more apparent. Plus, when you pull and replace the connector, the disturbance to the other cable runs is minimized.

So, yeah, the short answer is “put ’em at the mic stands and monitors,” but the question of where all those coils go has a good bit of philosophy behind it.