I have a funny story about long RCA cables. When we were first releasing the Transporter, I was tasked with setting up a test system to test each unit as it was completed. This was not an easy thing; I'm sure there are some people with poor opinions of the Transporter audio quality, but finding a test device with high enough quality to test the Transporter in the way we needed was a challenge.
After we got it set up, I realized I was using a crummy little dual-RCA cable of unknown provenance for the RCA output tests. At the time, Slim Devices was selling some audiophile-brand RCA cables (maybe some of you remember) so I went and pulled some out of stock, even though MSRP was $60 or so. After I put the new cables into the test system and ran it, imagine my surprise when THD, noise, frequency response, and crosstalk tests all failed! I double checked my connections, twisted all the connectors slightly to make sure there was good contact, etc etc. I went and got some recently-tested good units to make sure it wasn't a failure of the Transporter I was working with. They all failed. These were nice cables with fancy ends. The packaging bragged about the special conductors and teflon dielectric and robust shielding. Finally I realized that the crummy RCA cable I had started with was 1 meter long, and the audiophile-quality cables were 2 meters. We didn't carry them in 1-meter lengths, so I ordered some 1-meter high-quality cables. Until they arrived, I went back to the 1-meter no-name cheapo cable I had started with. So, on the Transporter test system, I was easily able to measure differences between 1-meter and 2-meter RCA cables. And these were not transient problems that came and went with cell phone activity, or varied by Transporter. This was 100% consistent. My rule of thumb after that experience is that the #1 bang-for-the-buck improvement you can make to your sound system is simply not to use cables that are unnecessarily long. -- ChrisOwens Christopher Owens QA Manager [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ChrisOwens's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4240 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=68131 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
