Focal Professional CMS50 Studio Monitors

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The product does not include cables to connect to a Mac! Power cables are the only cables mentioned in the description. What cables do I need to buy

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5 Answers from the Community

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    A very late reply, but it might help other people out. These are professional studio monitors, and very good entry ones at that, they're not cheap PC speakers or designed to make dodgy recordings sound great. To get the best out of them, you will want your Mac to be connected to an external DAC (digital to analog converter), either via USB or the headphone-out which doubles as a digital out; spdif/optical toslink to be precise. You would then connect the Focals either via unbalanced RCA cables, or balanced XLR if your DAC supports it. Some examples would be the Apogee Duet or DAC Magic for entry level. You don't need amplification because these are active not passive speakers.

    If you're going to have a decent desktop set up, then you need to go all the way (this includes high-bitrate AAC, or ideally ALAC files, turning off iTunes EQ in order to avoid upsampling or the audio, and isolating the Focals from the desk they are sitting on, otherwise why pay all this money and not use them properly?

    Hope that helps someone.

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  • The 28-Oct-2010 answer is plain wrong.

    If connecting these speakers to a Mac, the Mac end is a standard 1/8" (3.5 mm) headphone jack, which is sometimes called a "stereo mini-jack".

    The speaker end is a standard RCA phono plug, which are commonly colored red & white for differentiation between the Left and Right speaker connections.

    Any electronics shop or music store will be able to provide you with a Y-cable in the above configuration (it's a very common cable).

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  • You can use rca or xlr cables (balanced or unbalanced)

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  • Buy a firewire or usb interface and output through that

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  • You need to use a stereo miniplug to RCA splitter. It should go miniplug to right and left output red and white.

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