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18 vs 20 ft cables?

#22
line6man said:
If you are just going by the total diameter of the cable, your results are not valid at all. You don't know what is jacket thickness, what is dielectric thickness and what is plate thickness/area. You need to at least visually identify everything, if it can't be accurately measured.
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I may have given you the incorrect impression that my tests were specifically about diameter correlating to capacitance. They weren't. That was just an interesting apparent tendency I observed, suggesting a potential for an actual correlation, which was why I mentioned it. FWIW, most of the cables I'm talking about loudly advertise that their wire bundles (inside the insulation) are much thicker than a typical cheap guitar cable. Some of them may be lying, of course.

I'm guessing you didn't see my other threads on this subject, so please check this out: http://www.ovnilab.com/articles/cablechart.shtml
 
#24
bongomania said:
I may have given you the incorrect impression that my tests were specifically about diameter correlating to capacitance. They weren't. That was just an interesting apparent tendency I observed, suggesting a potential for an actual correlation, which was why I mentioned it. FWIW, most of the cables I'm talking about loudly advertise that their wire bundles (inside the insulation) are much thicker than a typical cheap guitar cable. Some of them may be lying, of course.

I'm guessing you didn't see my other threads on this subject, so please check this out: http://www.ovnilab.com/articles/cablechart.shtml
Click to expand...

Cool.

I saw an advertisement for that Zerocap cable a while back and flipped out about it, because the very name of it defies the laws of physics that every real world component will have an LCR.
It looks like the cable does have a measurable capacitance, which makes the marketing BS!:spit:


honeyiscool said:
If you have one buffered tuner in your signal chain, this doesn't matter.
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If you run a high impedance passive signal into a buffered pedal, the signal is still high impedance until it leaves that pedal.
 
#25
line6man said:
If you run a high impedance passive signal into a buffered pedal, the signal is still high impedance until it leaves that pedal.
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+1 It is the cable between the passive bass and the first buffered device that matters. Creation Audio Labs now makes a redeemer beltpack just to solve this problem. Short cable from bass to beltpack.... then it doesn't matter.

http://www.creationaudiolabs.com/redeemer-beltpack/

Note: I have not tried the beltpack, but I have tried the redeemer and was very impressed. I just don't need a beltpack since I don't go for the sparkly highs type of tone. So a bit of upper end loss is fine with me :p
 
#26
I worked for a major cable company, (audio cables) for 10 years in sales. cable construction has changed dramatically over the years...ie jacket, copper purity, and addition of a seperate dialectric tape between the shield and inner conductor. That said..cables do sound different when you go from cheap to good. I have tested cables with a signal generator and ocilliscope from 10hz to 100khz and have only noticed very little difference in the higher freq's in voltage drop. I dont think there will be enough tonal difference that cannot be tweek'd with good tone controls.. I've had customers love the tone of cheap chinese cables over very expensive cables....like anythin find one ya like..
 
#27
Any opinions on the Monster Bass cable-designed for bass guitar?

"Dual heavy-gauge bass conductors and patented multiple-gauge wire networks deliver extended low-end frequency response and wide dynamic range."
 
#28
Stacatto said:
Any opinions on the Monster Bass cable-designed for bass guitar?

"Dual heavy-gauge bass conductors and patented multiple-gauge wire networks deliver extended low-end frequency response and wide dynamic range."
Click to expand...

Disclaimer: Purely my opinion

snake-oil.jpg
 
#31
bongomania said:
I haven't dissected any of the super-thick (super expensive!) cables I've tested, to confirm the wire thickness vs. the insulation thickness. Most of them have sealed ends, too, so it's not as easy as just unscrewing the plug body to take a look. This is something I definitely want to include in my data, but I haven't figured out a good way that doesn't involve cutting the cable in two.

I can say though that of the thickest cables (meaning by total outside diameter), only one (the Elixir) has lower-than-average capacitance. The others all have higher-than-average capacitance, seemingly in correlation to their outside diameter. I know that is probably not a real correlation, it just looks like one.
Click to expand...

Anyone want to play at being a scientist? Here's the formula for the capacitance per unit length (meter in this calculator) of a coaxial system.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/capcyl.html

Note that the three factors that affect the capacitance value are "a" the diameter of the inner conductor. "b" the inside diameter of the the outer shield. and "k" which is the dielectric constant of the insulation. k is 1 for air and 2.7 for polystyrene etc. Since the formula involves a natural log there is not any quick rule of thumb such as fatter cables have lower capacitance. But you can plug whatever you have into the website and get an answer. Usually, one simply looks up the capacitance per foot in a cable data sheet for a given kind of cable. Most cables run in the range 15-30 pf per foot.

You might think that a lower capacitance per foot is better since it will give you less "tone suck". True in that regard, but I found that such cable (usually with foam insulation or a plastic spiral spacer to make most of the support air) very much tend to be "microphonic" which is to say they produce noises in your amp if you move or bump them. Thus, they tend to be unsuitable for critical audio.

For the advanced student, one should note that there IS a way to eliminate "tone suck" on a passive instrument. This is to use a driven shield. Instead of coaxial cable, you use triaxial cable. Here you have a center conductor and TWO outer shields. If the amp drives the inner shield with a follower, it totally eliminates the effect of the capacitance of the shield! Some early condenser mics used this system. As far as I know no instrument systems are built this way. It's so much simpler to use standard cables and put a follower (cable driver) in the bass and make it active.
 

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