odd cable question - guitar tone, connectors, cable etc.

[billkahler]

Hello. I just bought some cable from Redco and had some 1/4" Switchcraft connectors laying around , soldered them up. I'm noticing huge differences in tone - guitar to amp between the newly soldered and my older cables. 

The old ones are cheapie cables, by the way. Checked my soldering etc. I have a cable tester and checked that out too. Even though the newly soldered cables look correct, I'm getting a reading as if they were TRS jacks on the cable tester, which they aren't. Sounds like inferior connectors - but they are Switchcraft with the metal sleeve threading onto a plastic piece on the back side.

Is there a difference in resistance between stranded and braided wire and where do you stand as far as quality of cable vs tone? Maybe I should have gone with Canare or something similar. The Redco cable I bought was their own brand and braided.

Additionally the cable tester I have is a Behringer. It has nine LEDs for tip, ring sleeve. On the tone sucking cables I just soldered, all nine LEDs light up and on the better sounding but crappy cables the LEDs light in an x TS on the outside and R in the center, which I'm assuming shows they are TS cables and there is no ring.

I got the connectors from  Effects Connection Online and they seemed to be very reasonable but now I'm thinking I should have spent more. Still I can't tell if it is the connectors or the cable that is the problem. I'm sure the soldering is good by the way.

Thanks for your help and input.

[Joe Hart]

This doesn't really answer your question, but I have found little to no correlation between price and good sounding cables! In other words, I have had good and bad cables from all price points. So, now I just go with cheapies and have a million of them laying about! And when one goes wacky, it gets tossed with no ill feelings!!
-Joe Hart

[petemoore]

  Hafta say I been doing the same thing.
  Depends I guess...
  I was going to build a wheatstone bridge to compare cables, but like the rest of us just put something short and stout between the source and the amp input, then see how bad 'all the rest of it' does in comparison. Pretty amazing I go through 10 boxes with I/O jacks and can't really tell any difference between a total of over 30' worth of cable, still I use something 'better' coming out of the guitar to where ..the impedance is boosted.
  I had a long junky cable for a long time and forgot about comparative testing it, when I finally did I found out it was definitely my problem, IIRC @ that time I'd also done some pedal swapping, partly due to cable confusion I think.
  I recently got a Monster replacement, it works much better, the old one was particularly noisey when touching stuff or when moving.

[calpolyengineer]

My brother had a cable where the connection broke inside the plug. So I cut it off and resoldered it. After that, there was a huge volume drop through the cable. Never did figure that one out.

-Joe

[brett]

Hi
capacitance (and to a lesser extant inductance) issues are huge in long cables (ie more than 6 ft).  It has to be a really crap cable to be bad if it's only 6 ft long.
I suggest that you use a cable that is low in capacitance (if you can get a meter), or has a low rating in pF per foot.  There's about a 10-fold range between poor and good.
cheers

[frank_p]

How do they make low capacitance cables ?  Putting further appart the layers of wires ?
Can they toss in some better dielectic materials in there ?
Just curious.

[ACS]

I'm noticing huge differences in tone - guitar to amp between the newly soldered and my older cables. 

Silly question, but is the length of the old and new the same?

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

I got weird results with a cable once because it had that black conductive plastic layer & a drain wire as the shield next to the braid.
And a bit of the black conductive plastic shorted out at the end..
The capacitance of a cable (of 6 feet or more) can usually be measured by a digital multimeter, if it has a pF scale.

[petemoore]

  Not to knock your cable making skills, as long as it's made cleanly/good solders...
  Talking about my skills, not bad...but the cables I was able to produce were always of questionable value, and I opted for 'better' / 'factory' cables, most of which are an improvement over anything I've made, some didn't work...
  Case in point: the Black/Silver 'knockers' at GC, the 6'' ones with big chromey angle pluts, new, 5 out of 5 got sorted into the junk pile for lack of continuity, only letting a 'crapped on' trickle of the signal through...another period of substandard, sick sound was detected, the cables were testing failures, and junked because of the 'tag back/no take backs' policy.
  By the time I sorted them out for the store..they'd ruined my sound for more than the 30 day policy. There's a bin full of these at the store, maybe they'll care about their/your cables in the distant future...kinda funny how the staff side of the counter makes people think 'dahh, nothin' I can do about it'.

[Johan]

many cables have a sort of double insulation, where there is a black layer over the inner layer..if so, you need to peel that black layer back more than the inner layer...it's semiconducting and will partly short your signal to the shield if you don't.....just a thought...
j

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Johan is talking about the same thing that I was. That black stuff threw me the first time I saw it.

[billkahler]

Thanks for the help guys. Turns out the answer is the balck stuff around the clear wrap around the inner wire. It's conductive. Would have been nice to have some small note when I received my shipment from Redco - I thought I had bad plugs. Additionally, you guys answered the problem quicker than they did!