Cables? PSpice? Baloney?

[sumgai]

I found this link while jumping around the innerweb like an addict in search of a fix:

terrydownsmusic.com/technotes/guitarcables/guitarcables.htm

It does a credible job of showing how a cable can affect one's tone. Fortunately, the author takes pains to specifically kill the rumor about how spending more money on a cable guarantees that it will sound better. ;D

For your edification only, of course!



sumgai

[bentfender]

killer link. I would have though a comparison with same length cable would have been better and In some cases people will argue the connector is a large variance as well to the sound. I dig what he is saying though. I am going to think more about what I need my cable to do now.
Great food for thought


Thanks

.»º©º« Bent »º©º«.

[JohnH]

Yep, I reckon we can give that link the seal of approval. Having similarly fiddled about with pSpice, it all seems to check out. How about linking it in the reference section?

John

[ChrisK]

Done is!

[sumgai]

Yeah, I kinda took a shine to it, almost before I even clicked on it.

bent, the reason he used different length cables was spelled out just before the chart..... they were items he already had laying round the house, he didn't go out and buy specific pieces for testing purposes.

Connectors, being solid metal, should not make much difference in tonality. The shape of the 'contact patch' might affect some of the parameters that in turn affect the tonality, but that shape stays the same from one ¼" jack/plug to the next, so we won't have much of an issue here. In fact, if one paid attention in class to his/her phsyics teacher, one would know that two dissimilar metals in contact with each other wil create a small electrical current of their own. It may be minute, but I'm here to tell you, if the alleged amount of allegedly bad oxygen in copper can allegedly affect the tone (think Monster's claims here), then it's given that gold (high resistance) and nickel plating (lower resistance) will definitely have a deleterious effect on the electrons passing through the connection. (Minute currents, etc.)

In my world, all of this is moot. I either play to please, and succeed, or I don't play - that's it. I don't waste time playing to displease anyone, that's for sure. And FWIW, no one has EVER come up to me after a gig and said "Man, you have such great tone! How do you get that, are you using Monster cables or something?".

Errrr, yeah, it's something alright. The tone's inside of my friggin' fingers, Junior, not in the bleepin' cable!

Makes me wanna scream! <insert Howard Beale "I'm mad as hell..." sound bite here>

I rest my case.



;D



sumgai


p.s. Chris, thanks for the Reference load. My first thought was to see how this would fly with the rest of the gang, but I don't think we're wasting anyone's time by making it prominent like that.

[JohnH]

Ive just got one question about the modelling that Id like to understand. The author uses a 'transmission line' to represent the cable, and notes that the main characteristic of it for this purpose is the capacitance. How do you interpret the parameters of a transmision line to work out its capacitance?

Also, I checked out some more of his site - lots of cool stuff, such as speaker design, spreadsheets, stompbox switching etc.

Thinking we should invite him to join us!

John

[sumgai]

John,

Thinking we should invite him to join us!

You've just been promoted to Minister Plenipotentiary and Ambassador-at-Large! ;D

Go get 'em, Tiger! ;D ;D



sumgai

[ChrisK]

The author uses a 'transmission line' to represent the cable, and notes that the main characteristic of it for this purpose is the capacitance. How do you interpret the parameters of a transmission line to work out its capacitance?

Well, it's complicated except, like in this case, it's not because using the term "audio" and "transmission line" in the same sentence is kind of like comparing a potato and a Porsche.

A transmission line in made up of lumped LCR circuits. Let's break it down to a centimeter at a time (I'm working in these goofy units just to make those stuck with a decimal system comfortable in that they won't have to use a binary system). If the cable is 4 meters (aboot 13 feet) an is made up of "lumps" of 0.01 Ohm in series with 1 uH driving 1 pF to the shield, we grossly have aboot 4 Ohm in series with 1.2 mH driving 1,200 pF to shield.

Hmmm, in this case (the wire is actually much less than 4 Ohm, the inductance is minuscule, and the capacitance is really less except for really crappy cables), the only thing that seems to matter is the cable capacitance at the very high impedances in a passive guitar wiring scheme (why we use 250K to 1 Meg pots, dinky caps, and really big inductors).


Yo, dudes, anybody for 25 foot coil cords (which more than anything else, probably drove the tone of the 70's).