sah5150":20n4lige said:
moltenmetalburn":20n4lige said:
Cables matter. Anything else said is BS. Science trumps all opinion and subjectivity.
What is the science besides capacitance and the length of the cable?
Steve
I am no mathematician, I have no idea what the exact formula is however I would assume it would be different for each material used. Simply capacitance, not winding patterns etc, I have little knowledge of those claims.
As for capacitance it is well known that after a passive guitar and sans buffer, capacitance will effect the high frequency secondary to the SHIFT IN THE LOCATION OF THE RESONANT PEAK of the passive pickup.
There are some cases where the output impedance is already low and attempting to hear a difference will yield negligible results.
This is USER ERROR.
Output impedance is the FIRST criteria used, if it is low it is already KNOWN that the cable will make little or no discernable difference as the interaction of the electrical system is nullified by the "buffered" output.
Guitar rigs are a mixture of high and low impedance outputs in the chain. Knowing the differences or NOT knowing them because you are an ignorant guitarist does not change the reality that there are situations where this is true.
As for the TONE, well that IS the subjectivity, everyone idea of what sounds best is different.
I will never claim a cable as BEST, as for making a tonal difference in half of applications, absolutely and irrefutable. It is simple science.
I.use solid core solid silver wire Coates in Teflon in All of my guitars. Necessary, hell no, do I like it yes, brighter and more output from the pickups as silver is more conductive than copper. When discussing tiny millivolt signals this can be a large.change.
Here is some reading:
"Capacitance in cable is usually measured as picofarads per foot (pf/ft). It indicates how much charge the cable can store within itself. If a voltage signal is being transmitted by a twisted pair or coaxial cable, the insulation on the individual wires becomes charged by the voltage within the circuit. Since it takes a certain amount of time for the cable to reach its charged level, this slows down and interferes with the signal being transmitted.
Controlling Cable Capacitance
Since cable capacitance is so important, a lot of analysis goes into minimizing it. This can be accomplished by:
Increasing the insulation wall thickness
Decreasing the conductor diameter
Using an insulation with a lower dielectric constant.
The size of the conductor is usually determined by the electrical requirements of the circuit that the cable interconnects. If the circuit has been designed to require a 22 AWG wire, you cannot reduce it to 28 AWG just to reduce the capacitance. Also, the insulation wall thickness cannot be increased beyond reason since this increases the diameter of the cable, increasing costs and affecting terminations. Thus, the insulation chosen for the cable often becomes the critical variable.
All dielectric constants are compared to air or vacuum, which is given a value of 1.0. A poor quality PVC insulation may have a dielectric constant of 5.0 to 6.0 or higher. Polyethylene has a much better dielectric constant of approximately 2.0. Foamed polypropylene or polyethylene insulations have constants as low as 1.6."
