I am an electrical engineer specializing in acoustics and have worked in the music industry at the highest levels. That said, the cable does impact the sound of a guitar. Sometimes this is viewed as a good thing sometimes not. In general the longer the cable the more it changes the sound. More important than the length is the quality, particularly of the cable and jacks. A relatively heavy, good cable of 20 feet or less, that is soldered with silver solder to gold plated jacks will give you the truest signal. That doesn't mean you will like it the best but it will be accurate to what the pickups are sending. I know some artist that like long (100') cables because is 'softens' the sound (due to capacitance in the cable) and others that swear anything over 10 feet hurts the sound.
Indeed, Epic, and thanks for chiming in with your professional expertise!
I limited my discussion of the TRS (low-z) use only to say that its use changes amplitude (and what we aurally
perceive from that difference), but not a sonic improvement over a high-z cable, provided that TS guitar cable is a good-quality one, and of reasonable length. I refrained from getting into the guitar-cable discussion as its capacitance and length do have definite sonic differences ...but this discussion often spirals into anecdotal "truths" and sometimes overly-geeky details that can confuse more than help (
not that this would confuse any of you engineers, mind you! ...but that aint me!
).
Suffice it to say (for Timfitz and anyone else cruising this thread), a "good" guitar cable is one of low capacitance per foot, have good ends (say neutrik, amphenol, et.al.), and is well shielded and properly soldered. No need to pay monster prices for a high-quality cable (haha, my little dig there, but that's me
), but my simple point was to state that so long as one runs a
quality TS cable as short as one can get away with (say, under 15'), then this part of the tone chain can be "checked off," freeing one to explore other avenues of tonal improvement, or experimentation. But good cables eliminate one important variable so one can focus on other aspects that matter.
Edward
