These factors include appearance, durability, flexibility, sonics, conductivity and shielding. Let’s have a look.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Cable Anatomy 101: Key Factors To Keep In Mind
These factors include appearance, durability, flexibility, sonics, conductivity and shielding. Let’s have a look.
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Having a limited but growing interest in creating artwork with sound components, I am going to keep a copy of Victor Brown’s Cable Anatomy 101 article on hand as a quick reference guide. Brown’s overview looks at six factors to determine overall cable quality, “appearance, durability, flexibility, sonics, conductivity, and shielding.” In regard to the photo of the soldering examples, I am having a hard time believing ‘the good’ example was soldered by a human. (Unfortunately, my own work falls somewhere between ‘the bad’ and ‘the ugly’.) I found the section on ‘Sonics’ particularly helpful, especially how capacitance may affect high-frequency response over long runs. To me, the most interesting section was ‘Shielding’ where Brown explains how different materials and construction methods can shield cables from RFI (radio frequency interference) and EMI (electromagnetic interference). Also under that section, I learned that the mysterious third wire in foil-wrapped cable is a drain wire and only acts “to provide a means to connect the foil shield to the connector.” Now I know.
Having knowledge of cable and cable construction it is interesting for me to see all of the things that I know to be good or bad attributes to a cables explained formally for me. This sort of formal explanation really helped me better understand why these things can have so much effect on the cable. For me however, in my cable purchasing experience I have primarily made my own cables or used homemade cable so the parts of this article won't actually help me with cable purchases. HOWEVER, it does give me things to look for when I'm doing a shop pull and testing cables for a big show that requires the best cables.
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