shasha
Fractal Fanatic
We got in to a big argument over on another forum so I thought that I'd bring it over here and try to create a bunch of discord at Fractal Audio as well. :mrgreen
In all seriousness though most of us are tone chasers or at least tone tweakers. From what I can tell from discussions there are two basic camps of guitarists, those that absolutely buy into guitar cables as being part of the tone and those that believe that it's snake oil and that as long as you can hear it then it is working fine.
From a personal perspective I had been using the same relatively pricey cables for years on end. I don't recall the brand and after this you'll probably understand why I chose to forget about them.
I had a friend over and we were jamming and as happens many times like that we ended up moving stuff and cables got mixed up and misplaced.
So I went to play the next day on my setup in my makeshift studio, grabbed a cable, plugged in and it was pure sonic torture. Everything was harsh and tinny and bright. At first I thought that there was a problem with my pickup, then suspected a bad tube in my preamp, but none of that made sense. I did some troubleshooting and figured out that it was this cable he had left at my place causing this.
Now remember, I wasn't thrilled about this sound at all.
So I went online and started doing some reading up on cables and got smart enough to be very dangerous, meaning that I am qualified to use wrong terminology and mislead millions of people with my haphazard conglomeration of Wikipedia and forum fueled expertise.
Long story short...I know, too late, I learned a bit about cable capacitance and it's impact on tone. Turns out that I had been EQ'ing to compensate for the high capacitance of my old cables in order to overcome the high end roll off. So in fact his cable wasn't at fault; it was my cables that were sucking my tone to death causing the change in sound.
Of course not everything on the internet is factual (actually most of it isn't), but I decided to try to demonstrate this phenomenon in a very simple clip.
The clip is recorded with my telecaster in the bridge position (volume and tone dimed) direct into the AxeFX, analog out into a Saffire DSPPro24 at 44.1kHz with zero post processing, no level adjustments or anything. The trickiest part was actually playing the same exact thing over 7 times without varying pick placement, attack or anything so I decided to keep it extremely basic and repeatable. My picking hand is locked in position with my pinky between the selector and volume pot and the pick is right above the bridge pickup's height adjustment screw.
The only variable in the entire path are the cables. The selection consists of a modest collection ranging from cheap to relatively cheap cables. There are no Mogamis, Canarys, George L's, Whirlwinds, Monsters or anything of the sort. They're all about the same price level and overall grade and the only difference between each that kind of weakens the accuracy of this test is length.
Capacitance is additive so the longer the cable, the greater the capacitance. Cable length varied from one 5' cable, one 15' cable and the rest were right around 10'. So yes, it's not a straight up A/B/C test with all things being absolutely 100% equal.
But this isn't about which one sounds best or anything like that so the names are irrelevant and the lengths only support the impact of capacitance. Basically these are the cables I had on hand and if you don't like the way it was done than do your own.
The only thing that I am trying to demonstrate is that even within cables aimed at the same price point (which remember is modest) that even then capacitance effects tone. None of these are in the ultra low capacitance range of the higher priced cables so the fact that you can hear any difference at all I think emphasis just how much difference you could potentially experience.
I'm not selling anything, I have no agenda other than to exchange information with others and I'm kind of in the middle ground of the two camps that I described earlier. I know that cables make a difference in tone, but I'm not convinced that a $500 chryogenically treated, oxygen free, 10,000 strand cable with 2pf of capacitance per for rated at 200GHz with zero attenuation is necessarily a good thing to own.
Price vs performance, finding the point of diminishing returns, practicality and avoiding the ridiculous are probably what I am shooting for in a good cable or anything for that matter.
And to be honest a little bit of capacitance does color your sound in what could be a positive manner to some. If you really want to do some reading from an actual expert you can go here and try to download the document written by Bill Lawrence (word of caution, it only works in Office 2010 or Open Office). Capactive reactance and the effect of resonance frequency are explained much better than I could do here.
In all seriousness though most of us are tone chasers or at least tone tweakers. From what I can tell from discussions there are two basic camps of guitarists, those that absolutely buy into guitar cables as being part of the tone and those that believe that it's snake oil and that as long as you can hear it then it is working fine.
From a personal perspective I had been using the same relatively pricey cables for years on end. I don't recall the brand and after this you'll probably understand why I chose to forget about them.
I had a friend over and we were jamming and as happens many times like that we ended up moving stuff and cables got mixed up and misplaced.
So I went to play the next day on my setup in my makeshift studio, grabbed a cable, plugged in and it was pure sonic torture. Everything was harsh and tinny and bright. At first I thought that there was a problem with my pickup, then suspected a bad tube in my preamp, but none of that made sense. I did some troubleshooting and figured out that it was this cable he had left at my place causing this.
Now remember, I wasn't thrilled about this sound at all.
So I went online and started doing some reading up on cables and got smart enough to be very dangerous, meaning that I am qualified to use wrong terminology and mislead millions of people with my haphazard conglomeration of Wikipedia and forum fueled expertise.
Long story short...I know, too late, I learned a bit about cable capacitance and it's impact on tone. Turns out that I had been EQ'ing to compensate for the high capacitance of my old cables in order to overcome the high end roll off. So in fact his cable wasn't at fault; it was my cables that were sucking my tone to death causing the change in sound.
Of course not everything on the internet is factual (actually most of it isn't), but I decided to try to demonstrate this phenomenon in a very simple clip.
The clip is recorded with my telecaster in the bridge position (volume and tone dimed) direct into the AxeFX, analog out into a Saffire DSPPro24 at 44.1kHz with zero post processing, no level adjustments or anything. The trickiest part was actually playing the same exact thing over 7 times without varying pick placement, attack or anything so I decided to keep it extremely basic and repeatable. My picking hand is locked in position with my pinky between the selector and volume pot and the pick is right above the bridge pickup's height adjustment screw.
The only variable in the entire path are the cables. The selection consists of a modest collection ranging from cheap to relatively cheap cables. There are no Mogamis, Canarys, George L's, Whirlwinds, Monsters or anything of the sort. They're all about the same price level and overall grade and the only difference between each that kind of weakens the accuracy of this test is length.
Capacitance is additive so the longer the cable, the greater the capacitance. Cable length varied from one 5' cable, one 15' cable and the rest were right around 10'. So yes, it's not a straight up A/B/C test with all things being absolutely 100% equal.
But this isn't about which one sounds best or anything like that so the names are irrelevant and the lengths only support the impact of capacitance. Basically these are the cables I had on hand and if you don't like the way it was done than do your own.
The only thing that I am trying to demonstrate is that even within cables aimed at the same price point (which remember is modest) that even then capacitance effects tone. None of these are in the ultra low capacitance range of the higher priced cables so the fact that you can hear any difference at all I think emphasis just how much difference you could potentially experience.
I'm not selling anything, I have no agenda other than to exchange information with others and I'm kind of in the middle ground of the two camps that I described earlier. I know that cables make a difference in tone, but I'm not convinced that a $500 chryogenically treated, oxygen free, 10,000 strand cable with 2pf of capacitance per for rated at 200GHz with zero attenuation is necessarily a good thing to own.
Price vs performance, finding the point of diminishing returns, practicality and avoiding the ridiculous are probably what I am shooting for in a good cable or anything for that matter.
And to be honest a little bit of capacitance does color your sound in what could be a positive manner to some. If you really want to do some reading from an actual expert you can go here and try to download the document written by Bill Lawrence (word of caution, it only works in Office 2010 or Open Office). Capactive reactance and the effect of resonance frequency are explained much better than I could do here.
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