Check your cables

ido1957

ido1957

9K Gold Member
I recently had my amp in the shop because I was getting a lot of static/hum when I was playing. I got new preamp tubes as that was what they said was needed. Brought it home and it still made noise so after some investigation I found the cable between my Boss GP8 and my amp was the culprit. Intermittent so it was hard to nail down until you played for up to an hour for it to happen. The cable was probably 25 years old so maybe it was just old. I wonder how much I wasted on new tubes over the past ten years when it was a cable...well maybe the tubes were bad too... Seems to be working fine after several hours of playing...
 
Whenever I run into connectivity issues of any kind....the first thing I do is check cables & then try some different cable(s) before moving on to other things.

I was chasing a microphone noise issue....intermittant...sounded like the tube in the mic was the cause or some other electronic component.
Turned out to be the the 7-pin cable from the mic to the tube power supply....one of the wires had broken at the solder point, but was still in contact, though just barely.
Easy fix of a problem that seemed like it was something much bigger.
 
I was fix'in me wife's bass jack and had to figure out why the heck it was TRS. Out came the meter and the very first TS patch cable I happened to grab for for some testing was giving bizarre readings- turned out to be some 40 ohms through the shield. Not a new cable by any means, but probably not abused (I'm nice to my cables and stuff). But would I have noticed if I hadn't happened to have caught it with the meter? IDK.
 
I have a cable tester but all that does is tell me where the problem is. I'm REALLY bad at soldering so it means I just toss the cable into the bad stuff pile until I find someone who can fix em for me.
My motorcycle was running on one cylinder a couple of months ago - I was in a deluge and it couldn't get up hills; had it towed to the bike shop and a jammed choke cabel was diasgnosed so it was replaced - all up about 200 bucks. 6 weeks later same problem - towed to bike shop - seems the waterproof shield on one of the igniters had a pin head sized gap in it & when wet the spark was coming out through the water & across the bike frame so the cylinder couldn't fire. That was $400 & was the real problem in the 1st case. I was less than amused.
 
miroslav said:
Whenever I run into connectivity issues of any kind....the first thing I do is check cables & then try some different cable(s) before moving on to other things.

I was chasing a microphone noise issue....intermittant...sounded like the tube in the mic was the cause or some other electronic component.
Turned out to be the the 7-pin cable from the mic to the tube power supply....one of the wires had broken at the solder point, but was still in contact, though just barely.
Easy fix of a problem that seemed like it was something much bigger.
Click to expand...

Completely agree and I do exactly the same thing. Indeed, for live work I have several shipping cases full of various cables (mainly XLR but lots of others too) and on a boring, rainy afternoon I'll sometimes sit down and check each cable one by one.

Having said that, just for the avoidance of doubt, this is NOT an advert for the purchase of overpriced pre-made cables marinaded in a liberal dose of snake oil. Any decent cable with decent connectors is fine--they don't have to be gold plated, oxygen free, single direction audiophool rubbish.

(I'll save my tale of the electronics store salesman who argued blind that I needed gold plated TOSLINK cables...i.e. fibre optic...because it would make a better contact and not corrode.)
 
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