The Zerocap cable?

[JohnH]

Now while we are thinking about cable tone buffer gadgets, heres another one. Who can speculate on how this works?

www.aqdi.com/zerocap.htm

Heres what it says:

The ZEROCAP consists of quality custom manufactured guitar cable and fully shielded metal plugs, plus special interface electronics housed in a tiny enclosure toward one end of the cable. Connect the ZEROCAP cable between your guitar and amp, turn it on, and you are ready to rock! It's battery powered so there are no power supplies to plug in

The ZEROCAP cable reduces the cable capacitance to near zero, typically 50 picofarads (in any length), which is effectively the capacitance of the connectors. Even the best guitar cables have 15 to 30 picofarads of capacitance per foot, amounting to a tone killing 650 picofarads for a 20 foot cable.
The ZEROCAP cable lets you use long guitar cables with little high frequency loss.
The ZEROCAP cable eliminates the "tone suck" when you roll back the guitar's volume pot.
The lack of capacitance eliminates the midrange gain boost caused by plain guitar cables.
The pickup is still connected with a straight through wired connection from the guitar to the amplifier.
The ZEROCAP cable does NOT buffer or amplify your guitar's signal with inline electronics.
The ZEROCAP cable does NOT change the output impedance of your guitar

The key bits, are in bold, theres active electronics in a small box, but there's a straight through connection from input to output, and a result with almost all capacitance eliminated. Is it snake oil? Actually I think it is true, it can be done!
cheers

John

[flateric]

Active electronics? Sounds to me like the old sweet switch Paul Reed Smith built into Santana's custom guitar to help preserve the highs when using a long cable on stage. May well be worth a tiny LCR circuit but I'm doubtful the audience I play to at a Saturday pub gig will be able to appreciate the tonal nuances when I launch into another rendition of Black Magic Woman.

[JohnH]

What? Do you mean that the pubs in your area are not filled with audiophile electronics nerds?

I think that this will maybe serve the same job as Santanas switch, but it could be placed at the far end of the cable and still work.

Also, I think there are gadgets which are genuinely useful, and also those which are interesting and clever. I think this one is definately the later but not necessarily the former.

The interesting part to me is that it is an active device, but there is still a hard-wire connection from input to output.

cheers

John