Several rational options are available. FWIW, I've suggested Canare F-10 RCA plugs and Mogami 2549 bulk cable, for many years. Connect the shield only at the "sending" end. Find distributors who are close to home.
BTW, a short, unshielded, 3 wire braid (1 "hot" & 2 "cold") can be useful, where cable capacitance must be minimized. Resistance to EMI and RFI is low. TANSTAAFL is a fact of life.
BTW, a short, unshielded, 3 wire braid (1 "hot" & 2 "cold") can be useful, where cable capacitance must be minimized. Resistance to EMI and RFI is low. TANSTAAFL is a fact of life.
Any and all unbalanced RCA interconnect cable should be a COAX. end of story.
Not so!
Cases can be made for both coax. and twin signal carriers plus SE shield, in audio cabling. A benefit can be realized when the noise the shield picks up is not mixed into the signal.
Completely unshielded cabling is frequently needed, when the signal source's O/P impedance is high. True passive control centers are a prime example. Shielding increases the capacitance that high impedance sources interact adversely with.
A SPDIF digital cable should be made from the best RG6 category coax. that can be sourced. True 75 ohm RCA plugs are not available, but Canare comes darned close. It's not the F-10.
I ran unbalanced signal in non-coax (actually cheap speaker wire! spliced to some CAT-3 wire) over hundreds of feet in a job-critical application. Never had trouble with stray buzz or clicks.
I'm not as dumb as I look. Signal level was mildly high, source Z was 50r, termination was 440r (arbitrarily convenient values). Later theory suggests the termination was not needed for line-crap, but it was also a DC feed so a low R was needed.
I'm not as dumb as I look. Signal level was mildly high, source Z was 50r, termination was 440r (arbitrarily convenient values). Later theory suggests the termination was not needed for line-crap, but it was also a DC feed so a low R was needed.
I don't recall any of the experts on the subject writing that.
Some of the experts:
Keith Armstrong
Jim Brown
Neil Muncy
Henry Ott
Bill Whitlock
Are you trying to say that a modulation of reference potential ("ground") is influencing signal potential?
Honestly don't know - those were random internet photos chosen for illustrations of cable geometry.
This looks decent:
Lake Cable AVB20UGC Dual Braid Instrument Cable | Redco Audio
I've used their twisted-pair-plus-mylar-shield to carry signals inside of amps.
Lake Cable AVB20UGC Dual Braid Instrument Cable | Redco Audio
I've used their twisted-pair-plus-mylar-shield to carry signals inside of amps.
I have used cable similar to/same as with the conductive pvc under the braid......sounded quite good in a carbon kind of way.
Dan.
I struggle to understand why people think that the cabling used to record the music they're listening to isn't good enough... This isn't UHF here. The wavelength at 20 kHz is something like 15 kilometers. Your interconnects are going, what, five meters? Maybe?
I feel like this whole cable obsession started when some audiophile with no background in engineering or physics overheard some ham radio operators blabbering on for an hour about coax and assumed it must apply to them too.
Just buy some starquad Mogami or Canare cable and some nice Neutrik connectors (you can even get gold-plated ones if you insist) and be done with it. The best part? You can make it exactly the length you want so you don't have a big rats nest to deal with.
As a side note, the Mogami W2944 "console cable" is great for use inside amplifiers. It's thin and flexible and works perfectly fine. I suppose it would be great for building a console as well, for the (at most) five people who decide to do so.
Most of my cables are made out of the insides of an old Canare mic snake that I cut apart. Fine so long as you don't need rough handling. Great for the test bench though since they're so thin and flexible.
Edit: Just looked at the website for those "Anti-Cables". What is this "Dielectric Effect Distortion" they speak of? I think I smell marketing quackery.
I feel like this whole cable obsession started when some audiophile with no background in engineering or physics overheard some ham radio operators blabbering on for an hour about coax and assumed it must apply to them too.
Just buy some starquad Mogami or Canare cable and some nice Neutrik connectors (you can even get gold-plated ones if you insist) and be done with it. The best part? You can make it exactly the length you want so you don't have a big rats nest to deal with.
As a side note, the Mogami W2944 "console cable" is great for use inside amplifiers. It's thin and flexible and works perfectly fine. I suppose it would be great for building a console as well, for the (at most) five people who decide to do so.
Most of my cables are made out of the insides of an old Canare mic snake that I cut apart. Fine so long as you don't need rough handling. Great for the test bench though since they're so thin and flexible.
Edit: Just looked at the website for those "Anti-Cables". What is this "Dielectric Effect Distortion" they speak of? I think I smell marketing quackery.
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I'll be honest I forget sometimes that most people don't run everything balanced. I have a lot of pro gear around, so if I design my preamps and power amps to have differential ins and outs, then they interface nicely with my MC^2 amplifiers and the desk that I'm modding.
That said, usually with RCA cables that I do make I just use one pair of the star quad for the center conductor and tie the other pair to the shield. The shield in that stuff is a very tight braid, so it works okay. Maybe not ideal, but again this isn't UHF.
The biggest problem with star quad cable for RCA interconnects is that it's a royal PITA to work with for this. There's the unbraiding, the stripping four wires, etc. Anyone who's done it knows what I mean. If I had to make a lot of RCA cables I'd probably buy some "instrument cable" that has the proper coaxial construction.
What I want to see is an audiophile magazine recommending people use LMR600 as speaker wire, just because I think it would be funny to watch people actually try to use it and realize that it's about as flexible as copper pipe.
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