Go ahead and try to buy yourself some surround sound speakers, or a sound card for your computer. No doubt the person selling you your equipment will tell you that you need some monster cables for all of your connections with gold connectors, as well as monster cables for your speakers, and of course, the top-of-the-line sound card for your computer.

As someone who has worked in the pro audio field for most of my career, and was also formally trained in audio production and engineering, I’m going to tell you a little secret — you don’t need great equipment to have great audio.

I spent more than five years of my radio career doing production from my home studio. Do you want to know what kind of soundcard I had to do professional audio production? Factory. That’s right, I never even installed an upgrade. I never even used anything other than the 1/8 in. input on the back of the computer. And you want to know what else? No one ever noticed a single difference in the quality of the sound produced from my studio compared with any of the state-of-the-art studios at the stations.

I’m not saying that there are no differences, I’m saying that the differences are very difficult to hear. This doesn’t mean that you can record an album in your home that will sound as good as one at a good recording studio, but it means that if you do things right, you can make a pretty damn good sounding piece of audio.

Audio quality is only as good as the source. When it comes to the actual recording process, the acoustics of the room are far more important than the equipment you are capturing it with. Having a $3,000 microphone doesn’t mean much if your room has a terrible hum or buzz that shows up in everything you record. I’d rather record a voice-over on a Shure SM-58 in a silent room than record on a Neumann U87 in a room with a chronic hiss.

In my opinion, audio quality is dependent more on the source recording (acoustics and such) and speaker quality than anything else.

If you want to spend money on a home studio, spend it on the acoustics of the room you plan to record in. In today’s digital world, sound quality remains good through as many generations as you go through. Running a recorded piece of audio through an average mixer with digital (RCA) connections will keep the audio the same on the other end. If you were to record it on tape, then onto tape again, you would be losing a generation of sound and it would lose quality. If you have a digital signal flow, you will keep your quality all the way through.

For instance, you are at a bar and meet a celebrity who you’d like to record a liner for a project you’re working on. You happen to have an SM-58 and a digital recorder on you (as we all do), and get them to record a 10 second liner. Once that liner is on your digital recorder, you can keep that same quality sample through a dozen pieces of equipment, assuming all links in the chain are properly working. You can run your digital recorder into a 16-channel mixer, into a 2-channel mixer, into an amp for your speakers, split off into your computer, and you will not hear a difference from the original.

All of this with plain old RCA cables or XLRs if your system is compatible. I literally run an RCA-to-mini cable out of my 16-channel mixer into the MIC input on the back of my factory PC, and do all of my recording that way. And no one has ever noticed.

If your business is post-production or voice-overs or something like that, you can get by on a very small budget and not sacrifice audio quality. If you are recording music, you can do pretty good if your room is acoustically acceptable.

I’ve recommended Monster cables in the past, but I’ll tell you right now, I don’t use them anywhere in my studio. I think they are fantastic for video, and I have them in use on my HD televisions, but for audio, they simply aren’t worth the cost. If somebody tells you that they can hear the difference between the same album on Monster cables versus some Radio Shack RCA cables, they are full of it. Call them on it and play an album they are not familiar with five or ten times, and see how many they get right.

There are certainly times when you need better cables and equipment. If you plan to record a full-scale album, you might not want to upgrade your inputs into your computer. But I stand by that if you have good acoustics in the room you are recording in, and you know how to place a microphone, you can make a damn good piece of music.

For those in the professional audio industry, there are certainly times to use better equipment and spend some money. But for “audiophiles” who are simply listening to music for pleasure, your money is better spent elsewhere.

And if you are sitting at home with a $5,000 audio system to listen to CDs on, I feel for you. I have no doubt in my mind that you could enjoy your music just the same by spending 10% of that. Then you could spend the rest on more albums and a new chair to sit in. Unless you are paying for volume, you are probably wasting your money.

I’m sure some of you will disagree with me about hearing the difference, but if you do, please set up a legitimate Pepsi Challenge for yourself before you disagree with me.

The art of making good audio is in the hands of the engineer and producer. Whether it’s a full album or a few radio promos, the producer can make it sound great or make it sound lousy. Good cables and soundcards are no substitute for basic technique and creativity.