measuring cables

[Bagge]

Today I did an A/B test with my usual bass cable and a Sommer cable, and was surprised to find the difference in sound. So I went home to test my patchcables. ( I've had some troubles recently with tone loss). There was nothing wrong with resistance reading. As I'm not able to do capacitance readings I tried other things, among thos voltage readings. To my surprise one of the patch cables read around 10mV measured from tip to sleeve. How is that possible? Is the cable "storing" voltage?

[zpyder]

tiny, invisible, isolated lightning strike?

tesla's ghost?

live next to a power substation?

nano mice in your DMM?

you're more than just drunk?

you didn't take the label off the DMM readout when you bought it?

there is no spoon?

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

The input impedance of a modern digital multimeter is ungodly high. To the extent that it will pick up stray hum & try to rectify it & give false readings, especially on the lowest AC scale.
In fact if I am checking out an unknown transformer's voltages, I put a 10K resistor across the input so that tiny capacitances between windings will not leaad me astray.

[grapefruit]

Yes, with my cheap multimeter the voltage reading floats around tens of millivolts if not connected to a volatge source (or shorted) , but with the Fluke it usually sits on zero.

Stew.

[stm]

A couple of years ago I bought a Monster Standard guitar cable (12 feet), and made a big improvement over the brandless cable I was using.  There was clearly more treble content.

I measured this cable's capacitance with a digital multimeter and got a reading of 588 pF.  I am curious to know if someone has measured the Rock and Jazz Monster cables to find out what's the story on the difference in sound they are suppossed to produce.  My first guess would be the Rock version has even less capacitance than the standard, while the Jazz version has more.  The question is, how much?

[dosmun]

www.lavacable.com