Budget Guitar Cables......

Marshall_stax

.......Are there any good ones, or is the very idea a false economy? 

ICBM

Not at all. You can buy perfectly good cables that aren't expensive.

These ones seem OK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stagg-SGC6VT-RD-Series-Vintage-Instrument/dp/B002Q4F3G4/ref=pd_bxgy_267_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=00H8N040G2VB7BHDGZX0

The cloth covering helps make them a bit more robust than the usual cheap ones, they don't tangle and twist as much. They come in a variety of colours if you don't like that one!

To do any better than that you really need something made with professional-grade cable and Neutrik plugs.

Sporky

Having done some blind testing there is a difference between different cables, sound-wise, but it's vanishingly small. A/Bing recordings you can just hear a difference in the treble - nothing else - but nothing that you couldn't resolve with a tiny tweak of the amp.

That wasn't a price thing; a cheapo Piranha sounded exactly like a very expensive Vovox, and a homemade Klotz/Neutrik sounded exactly the same as a Pete Cornish. The latter two had a hair more treble than the former two, but only a hair.

The ones ICBM suggested are probably perfectly serviceable. Otherwise I'd suggest spending a touch more and going to Kabl.

EricTheWeary

I have a braided cable like one of those ( Rotosound branded I think) that I used for a few gigs then has been the one hanging around the back room, used, trod on,etc, for many years and has been fine. Just reading a few reviews on that Amazon link and it sounds exactly like mine : bit stiff, can kink ( the cable, the cable!).

Rocker

I know that cables do affect the sound of your hi-fi system (sound of large can of worms being opened :bz ) but not usually a problem with guitar leads. What with FX pedals etc also the tone controls on the guitar and amp, how would one hope to determine which lead is best anyway? If it works and does not tangle, continue using it. Not something to get too worried about. IMHO of course.

ICBM

Lets's not get into the hi-fi cables again .

But guitar cables do make a real difference, and in ways that can't be corrected by the tone controls on the amp. The big culprit is cable capacitance, which takes off top-end (and can't be put back by turning up the treble on the amp, that just increases the brightness of the remaining signal, which is not the same thing) - but also actually alters the resonant peak of the pickup slightly, because in a passive guitar the cable is electrically part of the guitar circuit. So the cable literally changes the sound of the guitar.

OK the differences are not huge - and in fact the difference between a short cable and a long one of the same quality is at least as important as between a good one and a bad one of the same length, because capacitance is directly proportional to length - but they are real, and do make enough of a subtle difference that it's worth trying a few and seeing if it matters for you.

That said there is still a lot of nonsense marketing in guitar cables. From a tone point of view the *only* property that matters is the capacitance, and it's as easy to find a low-quality cable with low capacitance as a high-quality one - in fact poorly shielded cables with thin conductors are inherently low-capacitance... but noisy and break easily. The trick is to get a cable which is well-shielded, robust, doesn't suffer from handling noise, doesn't kink or tangle, *and* has low capacitance all at the same time.

Sporky

I believe the Klotz LaGrange meets all of those requirements.

Danny1969

In the studio we had various sockets for running cables from the control room to the live room ... Mainly so guitarists could have their heads in the control room and the speaker cabinets in the live room. One day though I decided to run a guitar signal through the patchbay which was intended for headphones sends , this meant the guitar signal was going through around 32 m of balanced cable. The capacitence loading was so great on a Les Paul there was no difference left between the bridge humbucker and the neck humbucket... no perceivable difference at all .
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Basically your average guitar cable is a low pass filter with the resistance of the cable in series with the signal and the capacitance loading shunted to ground.

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It's another plus for having EMG pick ups in a guitar. In the above scenario an Emg equipped guitar had no high signal loss at all .... none that I could hear any anyhow. It's not a scenario you're going to come across every day obviously but it is a handy little thing sometimes

Gassage

If you can solder, Belden 8412 and some jacks and Robert's your Dad's brother.

ICBM

Sporky said:

I believe the Klotz LaGrange meets all of those requirements.

I don't like those, I find them too 'floppy' and easily tangled. I had one break too, many years ago - somewhere in the middle of the cable. I can't guarantee it didn't get kinked and pulled, or trapped under something, but it's something that's never happened with the Horizon Vintage IIs I replaced them with.

Danny1969 said:

Basically your average guitar cable is a low pass filter with the resistance of the cable in series with the signal and the capacitance loading shunted to ground.

The resistance of the cable is negligible to the point it's not there at all - typically an ohm or two in a circuit with source and load impedances in the tens or hundreds of kohms. It's only the capacitance that matters.

Resistance matters in speaker cables though, over longer runs it can also get up into the ohm range and that's in a circuit with only a few ohms load impedance. But capacitance is negligible in a two-parallel-conductor unshielded cable, and wouldn't matter unless the amp is poorly designed anyway.

Megii

I once thought I'd save some money, and bought quite a few metres of some inexpensive (50p a metre) guitar cable wire, plus some Rean brand jacks. Made up several cables (trust me I did a good job) and unfortunately, even a 3 metre cable had a horrible effect - just made everything sound dull and lifeless. Far from a subtle difference, and as @ICBM has said, impossible to correct for by turning up the treble on the amp - that just gave a harsh, unpleasant kind of sound.

The cable was described as "low capacitance" but of course, without any quoted figure, that could mean anything, and I think it must have been a pretty high capacitance, compared to most guitar leads. I very much doubt most guitar leads, including the budget ones, are anything like that bad, but the experience has put me off buying any lead or cable where there is no quoted capacitance per metre figure.

I think Klotz LaGrange was replaced with Klotz AC110? I have a cable I made with AC110 and Neutrik jacks, and it's pretty good, although if I'm being fussy, I'd say it could do with being a bit more flexible - perhaps they overcompensated if the LaGrange was considered too 'floppy'.

A few months ago I invested £15 and ordered a cable from a UK maker - Sommer SC-Spirit cable and Neutrik jacks - and that is superb: low capacitance, flexibility of the cable is about perfect, quality feel, and gives the impression it will last indefinitely. For me, that's great value, and worth the small extra cost over a budget cable.

Danny1969

I always use mic cable for making guitar leads, purely because I make hundreds of cables and buy it on 100M rolls but also because it's good quality, well shielded and robust to stand up to gigging. . A 5 metre cable with Neutrik jacks works out at £16 delivered to the UK. We sell hundreds of them. The Neutrik ends never break or cause grieve and the chuck type strain relief is excellent

Sporky

ICBM said:

Sporky said:

I believe the Klotz LaGrange meets all of those requirements.

I don't like those, I find them too 'floppy' and easily tangled.

That's odd - I'd never describe LaGrange as floppy. Sommer Spirit, now that's floppy, so that's what I used for patch cables (the LaGrange was so stiff it was hard to get the pedals to sit next to each other).

Rocker

I bow to your superior knowledge and experience @ICBM, @Sporky, @Danny1969, @Megii. I can hear little or no difference at domestic volumes. Probably different at gig volumes. Something that I have no recent experience of.

Megii

Rocker said:

I bow to your superior knowledge and experience @ICBM, @Sporky, @Danny1969, @Megii. I can hear little or no difference at domestic volumes. Probably different at gig volumes. Something that I have no recent experience of.

Not saying you or anyone is wrong here @Rocker - we can only report our own experiences. It's very possibly the case that I unwittingly made a terrible choice with the cheap guitar cable I bought, and that nearly anything else I might have purchased would have been much better. I'm sure you would have heard the difference quite clearly yourself - I had a strat with some very nice handwound pickups, and which I knew to have a lovely sound with a shimmery high end. The cheap cables I made up just destroyed that shimmer, and I had only to switch back to my usual guitar cable, and all was fine again.

Very likely I am over-compensating by refusing to buy anything without a quoted capacitance figure, but once bitten, twice shy, as they say.

ICBM

One big problem is that the *plugs* can have surprisingly high capacitance - you may not realise why until you see how some of them are made, with a very thin insulator between the tip pin and the sleeve tube - so the cable capacitance isn't the whole story.

This can make quite a big difference, especially with patch cables where you may be using a dozen or so of them on a pedalboard.

It surprised me too until I measured one once!

Megii

Is there anywhere where jack plug capacitance figures are quoted I wonder?

ICBM

Some here - http://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/article-1-4-cable-connectors-which-brand-to-choose.1116847/

I know it's Vertex Effects , but I have no reason to doubt his figures - I seem to remember finding about 40pF for a Neutrik NP2C as well, and being surprised how high it was compared to other lower-quality (physically) plugs. The reason is that the centre pin and the sleeve are both thicker than normal - which is what makes them robust physically and electrically, but means the insulation between them is thinner, and capacitance is inversely proportional to separation.

It won't make much difference on a 10' or 20' guitar cable, but it will on a 6" patch cable - the difference between a pair of low-capacitance plugs and a pair of high-capacitance plugs could be *greater* than the capacitance of the cable itself, so if you then have half a dozen or more cables on your board it will start to matter.

thomasw88

Rock cables seem cheap, and last, got a couple of them that have lasted 10-12 years or more I reckon. Personally my favourites are the award session cables tho.

Marshall_stax

Wasn't expecting my original question to get such a great response - thanks for all the input guys. I learned some things I'd never considered before. 

Phil_aka_Pip

Marshall_stax said:

Wasn't expecting my original question to get such a great response - thanks for all the input guys. I learned some things I'd never considered before. 

You often do on this site. It's ossum