On Monday, June 5, 2017 at 3:49:58 AM UTC-6, Don Pearce wrote:
On Mon, 5 Jun 2017 02:32:50 -0700, Paul wrote:
http://sfguitarworks.com/the-great-cable-myth/
What do you all think?
That is an extremely ill-informed article and the tests have been
performed wrongly.
Cable impedance - they give instead the figure for end-to--end
resistance. This has nothing to do with impedance, which is actually
the ratio of inductance to capacitance per unit length. Cable
resistance is of great importance to speaker cables, but meaningless
for guitars.
The tests have been done with a signal generator. The source should
have been a dummy circuit that simulates the complex impedance of a
pickup.
Guitar cables do make a great deal of difference to guitar sound, but
not because of their "quality". Their length is what matters. A longer
cable has more capacitance, and this will shift the primary resonance
of the pickup network a long way. A cable over about 10 feet long will
start dulling the sound in much the same way as winding back the tone
control.
So in short, ignore this article. It is gibberish.
d
Ty Ford and I made a comparison between a boutique guitar cable and my favorite guitar cable which is the skinny George L's cable with solderless ends..
Both were in 20 foot lengths.
We were using magnetic pickups which were not active.
The audio difference is readily apparent. The George L's cable had less loss of high frequency and when I compared the responses through a spectrum analysis program on my computer it verified the difference. Below 250 Hz the responses were identical. Above, the boutique cable rolled off.
I realize that this is a limited sample, but the results with my cable and others have been very consistent. I found out the difference is even more audibly apparent on a bass.
You don't need spectrum analysis to tell you the difference, just listen.