What is the advantage of low-capacitance cable?

What is the advantage of low-capacitance cable?

The propaudio ultra low capacitance cable lets you hear all the frequencies being produced by your guitar. High cable capacitance kills the high frequencies from your pickups, resulting in a muddy sound and the greater the signal loss. With cables that are paired, or coaxial, the two conductors with insulation or conductor and shielding in between form a capacitor, which holds an electrical charge.

The electrical resistance of a guitar cable is insignificantly tiny compared with the impedance of the pickups and controls, so that won’t affect your tone a great deal, but cable capacitance is another matter altogether. A capacitor is formed whenever two electrical conductors are in placed in close proximity, and for a given spacing, the larger the surface area of the conductors, the larger the capacitance. The core and screen conductors of typical guitar cable may produce a capacitance of around 30 picofarads per foot (or 100 picofarads per metre), so it follows that the longer the cable, the more capacitance you have hanging on the output of your guitar.

Putting a capacitor across an audio circuit creates a low‑pass filter, and given this, you might expect a long cable (or one with a higher capacitance than usual) to kill your guitar’s high end — and this is exactly the argument used by those companies making esoteric guitar cable. However, there’s actually far more to getting a great guitar sound than simply choosing a low‑capacitance cable.

Lower cable capacitance allows more of the natural “brightness,” “presence,” or “bite” of an instrument to reach the amp, which in turn allows the treble controls to be run lower, reducing hiss and other unwanted noise. High-frequency loss from the cable gradually becomes audible and objectionable depending on the source, the amplification and other circumstances. There is no point at which high-frequency loss suddenly appears or disappears. Raising the source impedance or increasing the length of the cable increases the loss. Guitars typically have much higher source impedances at higher frequencies because of the inductive nature of their pickups, which aggravates the effect of cable capacitance.

A Hi-Z signal can be subject to high frequency loss (usually over 10,000 kHz) due to capacitance from pots / knobs on the guitar and the guitar lead itself. Turning a pot up decreases the capacitance, leading to more high frequency in the signal. In regards to the cable capacitance, guitar leads all have a relatively low capacitance, with only very small differences between them. Cable capacitance is really just increased the longer the length of your cable. This is why guitar leads are not generally sold over 15m in length, and a DI box is often used to change a Hi-Z signal to mic level, so it can carried using a balanced microphone cable or multicore over long distances.

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