Michael Squires wrote:
Most of us just use cables to conduct signals from one place
to the other. Those who like looking at and fondling cables
more likely prefer "Monster" and other "boutique" brands at
rip-off prices. If you can't see/hear the difference in the signal,
it's not worth the money. Period.

Concur, spend the money where it matters.

The really cheap cables can have enough capacitance to cause changes
in frequency reponse with some amps/preamps with long cables.

Sounds like a case of a preamp with a **** poor line driver stage to me,
I would get it replaced with something competently designed.

I needed about 30' between
a preamp and the power amps and wound up making cables from surplus
coax cable, a military type with Teflon insulation, silver-plated
shield, and a very low capacitance per foot.

30ft is a long cable? On what planet? I routinely run mic level signals
(which often have source impeadences many times that of a decent line
driver stage) down 100+M (300+ft) mulicores and it all seems to work just
fine.

Now sometimes you can hear a difference in the special case of a ribbon
mic, but for anything with a reasonable amount of drive available (and
anything with a line output should have a reasonable amount of drive
available) 30ft is *NOTHING* .

Cables were measured on a GR 1650 impedance bridge, if anyone cares.

I really would not sweat the details like this, there are things which make
far larger differences to the quality of reproduction (of audio or video)
then the "wow these cables are really expensive" factor.
Spend the money on better room lighting (for video), better acoustic
treatment, better speakers, better processing......

For video, I normally choose a decent 75ohm cable (then terminate with
50ohm BNC (more mechanically robust, the electrical length of the connector
is neglegable for baseband video)). For long runs a Balun and 110ohm
twisted pair can have some advantages (most buildings are now wired with
lots of CAT5, which can be *really* convinient).

Regards, Dan.
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