Making better connections

  • Thread starter Thread starter RezN8
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RezN8

RezN8

Blick-um, blick-um...
Guaranteed authentic tales from the basement:

The bass playah grabs a cheap guitar cable from his gig bag, plugs in and starts thumpin' away on his $175 bass.

After about a minute, he turns to me and says "My bass sounds like crap!!! It's all muddy! Where's my tone? Gimme dat sound you got fo me lass night."

So I grab a quality cable and replace the "bargain" cable he was using.

He thumps. Everyone's mouths drop open. "Holy cow! That's 'THE' sound I was lookin' fo' -- you're a genius -- an awesome engineer!"

And all I did was replace the cable. Yup! that's all I did. Didn't take much. :rolleyes:
 
Cables definitely make a pretty noticeable difference in the sound, at least to my ears. For my CS strat and 83 Am tele, I've found lava cables to work the best (reallly fattens and sweetens the tone, smooths out the highs). For my old Kent SG copy, I go with Cobalt cables (makes tone clearer, very transparent, and opens up the top end). For my LP Std, the Lava for distorted rhythm parts and the cobalt for clean leads. For my Rick 4003, the cobalt (gets that "piano-like) sound. For my walnut body tele, I've yet to find a cable to go with it that really suits my ears. Just my 2 cents.
 
mrplow said:
For my LP Std, the Lava for distorted rhythm parts and the cobalt for clean leads.
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Must be a bitch to play it at gigs.
 
Yeah, that's when the wiring for stereo comes in handy... :p
 
Whatever floats yer boat. I've got at least 12 1/4 to 1/4 cables that I pull from at random for guitar and bass, all different makes/ages/lengths, and they all sound the same.
 
I'm with Mr GGunn.

I have had everything from a red-jacketed cable I bought 30 years ago at a drug store (I was young) to a M*****r that you would think was really good, from the price I paid. I have yet to hear a difference attributable to the cable, other than the obvious one that, once the solder connections come loose on a cheapy, you don't hear anything at all!
 
I admit that my vast experience has primarily been with these two cables in particular, which really are 2 different beasts sonically. Therefore, when doing an A-B comparison between the 2, the difference between the 2 is a lot more noticeable. Granted as well, if you're comparing all the typical $15-$20 cables from your local music store, they might all sound very similar. And for those who didn't get it the first sail around, the wiring for stereo thing was a joke (maybe if it was Rick, then it'd be a different story :D )
 
I hadn't paid a lot of attention to cables but I got given a long cable of unknown manufacture and it's the noisyest thing on the planet. How do you rate the Planet Wave and the Bill Lawrence cable?
 
I bought some Planet Wave cables a couple of years ago. The effects patch cables work fine, but the guitar cables I have make a lot of noise.
 
Once again, read this.

Unless it's actually defective (and a lot are), you can't possibly tell an audible difference in bass frequencies or volume between two remotely similar cables in a high-impedance circuit.
 
Get him to do a blind A/B test, 10 times straight and see how much he likes the sound of that cable.

Now perform the same test with the rest of the band playing. If he claims to hear a difference, sack him, he's bluffing.

Mechanical integrity, on the other hand we can all hear: the difference between good and bad is sound and silence (or noise).

Belden cable, connectors of choice, soldering iron. The best cables on the planet. (With a lifetime guarantee, if you keep the soldering iron with you.)
 
bongolation said:
Once again, read this.

difference in bass frequencies or volume between two remotely similar cables in Unless it's actually defective (and a lot are), you can't possibly tell an audible a high-impedance circuit.
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I tend to agree. I've used all sorts of cables over the years, including the expensive ones like Monster cables and Planet Waves. I've never really noticed any audible difference in the sound quality unless the cable itself was bad and made a lot of noise.
 
The Bill Lawrence cables are a nice concept - solderless connectors - and for pedal boards, their right-angle connectors work great and allow you to custom cut your own cable lengths in a jiffy. Just make sure you don't intend to move them around or uplug them regularly, because they WILL fail. Good choice if you tend to change your pedal board contents/layout quite often (during such times you will be checking them for continuity anyway).
 
We all have our favorite brand(s) of cables, they all sound fine when they are new. Cheap cables fail or get noisy faster than quality cables. I just wanted to mention that not only is there a lot of difference in cables, but also in the connectors. Slight variations make a lot of difference in how well they make contact, the plugs on some cheaper cables have smaller shafts and end pins and tend to wobble, this may not be a problem when connecting stationary gear but it can and will make for a noisy connection to a guitar or bass.
 
robin watson said:
The Bill Lawrence cables are a nice concept - solderless connectors - and for pedal boards, their right-angle connectors work great and allow you to custom cut your own cable lengths in a jiffy. Just make sure you don't intend to move them around or uplug them regularly, because they WILL fail. Good choice if you tend to change your pedal board contents/layout quite often (during such times you will be checking them for continuity anyway).
Click to expand...

I have been using a Bill Lawrence cable for over 2 years and it has been plugged in and unplugged a hell of a lot of times and still seems to be OK. It is clean with buggerall noise.
 
bongolation said:
Once again, read this.

Unless it's actually defective (and a lot are), you can't possibly tell an audible difference in bass frequencies or volume between two remotely similar cables in a high-impedance circuit.
Click to expand...


No shit.

The only reason I buy expenisve cables is because the cheap ones break/short out. I have never said tomyself, "wow self, that sounds so much better."

Now for the HiFi world, my favorite one was an old friend saying telling this girl that the Radio Tuners for iPods are only 'okay', but when you have a One Thousand Dollar tuner with fifteen hundred dollar bose satilite speakers, you really need the best connection."
The audiophile in me wanted to just snap and inform him that his 128kb MP3s are horse shit in the real world (of audio) and that his 'thousand dollar' tuner is only a thousand dollars because it have 7 channels (...7 pres, 7 amps) and that his room is so far off the charts awful that I can't even stand to watch movies in there 90% of the time...its like a shower, I kid you not.
But you have to justify a $90 digital MonsterCable somehow.

Just wait until I get my McIntosh system one day. I will demostrate what $5k per channel + the cost of speakers sounds like.
 
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the audiofile in you should know that you need an amp to drive speakers and not a tuner.
 
Quality cable + $175 bass still sucks.

RezN8 said:
Guaranteed starts thumpin' away on his $175 bass. So I grab a quality cable and replace the "bargain" cable he was using.

Wonder what the bass sound would be if you also gave him a quality bass to play thru that quality cable.

But then what kind of amp is involved ? Everything needs to be top of the line and then some talent added in will make for perfection.
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I'd bet Rezn8's problem was a bad cable, not necessarily poor quality.

Mechanical noise aside, the only thing that really makes a difference in guitar cables (or any high-impedance circuit) is capacitance. It's why you lose tone with long runs. The lower the capacitance, the less you lose for a given length. Phase shift, time-correct, skin effect, blah blah blah, it's just noise.

That being said, for a single 10 foot cable, it would have to be really crappy to have an effect you could hear. On a setup with lots of cables, effects, multiple amps, etc., it can surely make a difference.

If you look at the current "hot" cables, Bill Lawrence and George L., you'll notice they only really talk about two factors- capacitance, and mechanical noise from static electricity.
 
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