Microphone cable differences

[abbey road d enfer]

Brian May uses a set-up that could be deemed as absurd in pure technical terms.
His Red Special originally incorporated a Vox Treble Booster.
Actually, due to its quite low input impedance, combined with the pick-ups inductance the TB starts with a serious band-pass filter that attenuates both treble and bass, and leaves only the midrangey sound.
When BM found out he got a better sound without the TB and just the natural distortion from the AC30's, he noticed that long cables actually moved the bandpss a few notches down, to a sound he liked more.
Such a set-up cannot be qualified in the usual terms of fidelity, like frequency response or distortion.

 

[Tubetec]

Hendrix also liked the curly cables because he could use it to make the guitar wail when he used feedback from speaker to pickup , downside is it can sometimes form a tuned circuit that demodulates radio transmissions ,
At the Isle of Wight 1970 concert Hendrix is all bummed out about the amps , Rory Gallaghers Taste also had major problems with breakthrough from police radio and brown outs of the mains supply at that festival .

Of course were in a very different place now with regards RF interference than we were back then , noxious levels of it are everywhere . I think the effect of using curly cables now would be so unpredictable that it would cause headaches .

I never thought of measuring a curly cable with the LCR , chances are both inductance and capacitance vary as the cable is stretched .

 

[Tubetec]

I believe it was the Dallas Rangemaster top boost pedal Rory recomended to Brian and it became an integral part of his sound.

Straight from the horses mouth , as we say

 

[abbey road d enfer]

Noted. Slip of memory.

 

[amplexus]

And throw in that a typical passive electric guitar pickup also sees a variable impedance due to a tone control circuit.

A late reply but, as someone who does a LOT of amps every month I’ve never seen a guitar amp ever where signal hits a tone stack before anything else.

Post 1940’s virtually every decent commercial guitar amp built has the same input configuration- a 1M or higher load resistor to ground right at the jack, and a 68k (or so) grid stopper to the first tube stage. On some cheap/dept store brand small amps I have occasionally seen the input hit the volume pot first, but it’s still using the pot to ground as the terminating impedance.

 

[RuudNL]

I once recorded a guitar player. He said he preferred a short cable, because with long cables he could hear the delay.
I said: even if you would use 100 meters, you won't hear a delay! (The audio quality may suffer, especially on a guitar element, but certaily there is no delay!)

 

[rock soderstrom]

I once recorded a guitar player. He said he preferred a short cable, because with long cables he could hear the delay.

 

[k brown]

I once recorded a guitar player. He said he preferred a short cable, because with long cables he could hear the delay.
I said: even if you would use 100 meters, you won't hear a delay! (The audio quality may suffer, especially on a guitar element, but certaily there is no delay!)

Well, he just clearly had MUCH better hearing than you, that's all.

Don't let it get you down; "...for always there will greater and lesser persons than yourself." 🙏

 

[ubxf]

The different brands of mic cable sometimes age differently after a few years of handling and coiling. May be then it makes an audible difference.

 

[jrg.roberts]

The different brands of mic cable sometimes age differently after a few years of handling and coiling. May be then it makes an audible difference.

I have to say that I have never noticed any difference in a mic cable at studio lengths, as long as it wasn't broken - and I have some here I made in 1974 (I made them carefully, with decent cable, pre oxygen-free, and early adhesive-backed heatshrink - I have never had to fix them). But on tour and in theatre and with much greater lengths I have noticed differences and prefer decent double sheathed star-quad, for the noise-rejection, not the audio quality.

 

[MicMaven]

guitar player ... preferred a short cable, because with long cables he could hear the delay.

I remember using coiled cables way back in 1968 because they were considered "cool." - But, we quickly opted for long straight coils for OTHER reasons than audio quality. We soon discovered short, coiled cables were stiff and easily pulled our amplifiers over! It is a real embarrassment when your amp suddenly keels over as you jump around like Pete Townsend or Chuck Barry. Man, I really hate that awful crashing sound of the spring reverb thrashing about. Yep, LONG straight cables are definitely the way to go! // James //