braided shield cable

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notbradsohner

Compression Addict
I just got some new bulk mic cable, the kind with the braided shield. Unfortunatley, most of my cables have a terrible hum to them. I have determined this is the grounding of the cable. My question is, is there a certain way to twist the braided shield so that there are no shorts etc....right now I am just kind of pulling it back and hoping for the best. I really dont want to untwist all of that the get every strand of wire.
 
Pulling it back and hoping for the best is probably not the ideal way to go about this! You need to pull the braid apart far enough back to be able to twist it into a nice neat bundle, with no stray wires. Then you need to solder that to the shield on the connector. From your description, I'm not sure your cables are wired properly.
 
Use a small wire brush to undo the braid, or something similar, even a small nail. The trick is not to try to undo too much at one time.
 
Yes, I use a nail myself. It does require a bit of patience if you are making a lot of cables.

That's why my cable of choice does not have braided shield. For behind the rack cabling I use Canare console cable, which has a foil shield. On cables that will be handled a lot, like for patchbay connections for example, I use Connectronics cable. The Connectronics cable has a conductive plastic shield, no braid. So making cables is really fast and easy.
 
how does a foil shield work? I picture something like aluminum foil. I would imagin this would be hard to solder?
 
On the Canare console cable it is like a very thin tin foil. You never solder the foil shield itself. This type of cable has what is called a "drain wire" that runs alongside the shield, and this is what makes the soldering a lot easier. You just cut the shield off where you need to, and you are left with three wires (if you are making balanced cables), the positive, negative, and the drain. So instead of doing all that business of combing the braided shield out, you just trim the shield and then solder the three wires. It sure makes things go faster.

*However*!!!

Cable with foil shield is not meant to be moved around a lot or handled a lot, it is intended basically for permanent installs. The reason being that the foil will break down more easily than braid if it is moved around a lot. Braid is more flexible. So foil shield is perfect for rear of the rack cabling, because that is typically set up and then left alone.

Another however...

What I like about the Connectronics cable is that they got around this limitation by making their cables with conductive plastic shielding. This allows for *super* flexibility, and the cables can be used for situations where they will be handled a lot. I make my patchbay cables of this, and also any cables for synths that I use on live gigs. I also make some of my longer run studio cables from this, the stuff that might get moved around a lot of stepped on from time to time.

Hope this helps.
 
interesting............................thanks! :)
 
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