Canare Star Quad does have a braided shield... <confused> Never did any head to head testing, but I've used it for both balanced and unbalanced runs, and it's always performed flawlessly for me. Ease of handling, flexibility, and durability gets high marks from me too. Granted, I am probably a bit biased due to my heavy use of Canare materials in my ouw whole house project and several other distribution setups. Love their F and BNC connectors and tools, too.
Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone -------- Original message --------From: Jim Brown <[email protected]> Date: 1/16/18 11:48 (GMT-06:00) To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Elecraft] K3S Microphone Cable The nature of the shield matters a lot. Back in 1994, Neil Muncy, ex-W3WJE (SK), published the landmark AES paper in which he exposed both The Pin One Problem and Shield Current Induced Noise (SCIN). The Pin One Problem is the (now) well known equipment design defect, whereby the cable shield fails to contact the shielding enclosure, first going to the circuit board, where shield current is coupled to the circuitry. SCIN is a defect in the construction of "rack cable" having a foil/drain shield, whereby the drain wire is twisted at the same rate as the signal pair and is much closer (along the cable) to one signal conductor than the other. This causes shield current to induce a differential voltage on the signal pair. Neil did his work on how these mechanisms coupled at audio frequencies, but in multiple bar conversations when we met at conventions, he said that both were also very strong causes of RFI, and that Pin One was the dominant cause. In 2003, I did research that confirmed this. Audio old-timers may recall that in the late '80s and early '90s, Mackie mixers were almost certain to pick up AM broadcast stations that were on the high end of the band. My work on susceptibility of equipment showed that they suffered both from Pin One Problems AND that the bandwidth of their audio circuitry extended past 1 MHz! In attempting to use one of these mixers to test condenser mics for RFI from FM and TV broadcast, I found that these mixers themselves strongly detected RF from TV channel 2, and were thus unusable! I also tested the RF rejection of quad cables, including Canare, and found that they were inferior in that regard to a good braid-shielded cable like Belden 8412. Gotham Audio cable (an EU cable then imported by the Neumann distributor) also performed quite well. All of that work was published as AES papers. You can buy them for $10 each at aes.org, or you can download them without the AES logo from my website for free. :) k9yc.com/publish.htm Scroll down to find the AES papers. As to the Heil cable -- I've never seen it, don't know its construction. As Don notes, additional conductors can be useful for control functions. 73, Jim K9YC ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]
