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by amluto
753 days ago
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It’s possible to have a genuinely bad RCA cable: - It could be unshielded. Yes, this is a thing. It can pick up all kinds of easily audible noise. - It could have no contact or intermittent contact at one of the terminations. A bad shield contact will result in a cable that mostly works but can buzz horribly. - It can be hard to connect or can fall out by accident. But the real reason I made my own is for length. A cheap $1 cable is probably fine for, say 2 feet, but if I needed 11 feet, that cheap cable wouldn’t reach. Even the least audiophilic listener can tell the difference between music and complete silence :) Making an RCA cable from coax is easier and compression connectors is faster than making one from solder terminals, especially the cheap ones with un-tinned cups and fiddly stain relief. re: HDMI cables: that gold plating is indeed useless, but HDMI cables are built to different standards, and a cable of the wrong type won’t do what you want it to. |
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But yes, most of my runs are shorter than that. I really only need long RCA's for running audio from instruments and outboard on one side of my desk to the mixer at the other. The short runs aren't long enough to have significant capacitance, resistance, or experience inductive noise beyond what my projects require. They are a reasonable engineering decision.
<-> Ordinary RCA cables are more supple and more compact than 1/4" or XLR. If I was making my own long run cables from scratch, I'd use CAT5/6/7 anywhere I could. The stiffness and bulk of coax wouldn't match most of my use. Though that's my use not yours.
<-> I was using gold-plated-HDMI as an obvious example of the audiophile market segment.
<-> My experience has been ordinary RCA cables are more reliable than ordinary 1/4 for general patching because the strain relief tends to be better proportioned to the weight of the cable. And there's good availability of adapters to other common unshielded plug form factors. Again, at least for my use.