Show us your... guitar rig!

cgbrocks · Joined: 28 Aug 2006 Posts: 5 Location: Bluefield, WV

Adam,
Nice set up on your board.
And a very nice web site.

The 4 jack box is just basic mono in thru the effects and back out to my Crate tube amp. Just makes things a little easier when setting up.
I'm using some 4" velcro that I picked up at the local hardware store to keep everything in place.

Later,
Patrick

lee_UK · Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 9:56 pm Post subject:

rewindspline wrote:

lee_UK wrote:

Guitar leads use OFC oxygen free copper cable, mains lead is very poor quality. And coax isnt going to be anywhere near the quality of a good OFC guitar cable.
Im not sold on the Coaxial TV cable idea, you might start picking up BBC1 or worse still TV-Gold.
Does anyone else use this kind of cable? or has anyone else heard of using this kind of cable?
You obviously dont connect guitar cables from your head to cab because this is a voltage being handled and not a signal, lots of people make the mistake of using guitar cable, and like you say it's not designed for this kind of use, and can fail, and if you lose the connection between your head and cab then it could also damage the output transformer. which can be very costly.

Dude if your cable has a signal core and a ground shield it is coax - whether it's branded OFC or whether it's used for cable tv or antennae or industrial ethernet communications or instrument signal. The defining factors are the capacitance and characteristic impedance - some importance can be placed on physical flexibility for musicians.

OFC is a gimmicky title used to sell more - the oxygen content of the copper in different brands of cable is not going to vary enough to affect your signal - do you think a cable manufacturer has a copper refinery and can develop it's own type of copper? No, they give their copper supplier a specification.

Picking up BBC or whatever will not occur - coax is used to deliver the signal from an antenna to the reciever, coax itself is not a very good antenna. Amps have been known to pickup radio though!

The amplifier and the guitar pickup both output a voltage - the difference is the amp voltage will be in the hundred's while the pickup voltage will be in the thousandth's. That's basically the difference between power and signal - hence the term power amp. You need a power amp to produce enough voltage across a speaker to move it and create sound - obviously the amp power output is related to the speaker/s.

Because the power signal to the speakers is so large it doesn't suffer from interference or losses like a tiny guitar signal does. That's why the signal from a guitar pickup needs to be protected - interference signals can create more voltage in a cable than the guitar pickup and the guitar signal can be lost. Hence shielded cable i.e. coaxial cable.

You can't use instrument cable to connect to your amp head because of the current going through it and the cable resistance. Current handling capacity of speaker lead is much higher than instrument - have a look at a subwoofer installation - it will use thick cable.

summary - guitar lead is coax! Laughing

My guitar cable is multistrand and not single core, i know what coax is, ive worked as an Lan/Wan installation engineer for the past 15 years, i know why a cable is shielded too, i also know about bandwidth on cable, i dont accept that there is one quality of copper, i do beleive you get better guitar signal from OFC cable, and i also accept the better sheilding you have the clearer your signal from guitar to amp.
What i didnt know was that some people use Single Core Coax for guitar leads, ive never come across it in my 20 years of playing, ive never seen it mentioned in any articles either, like you say its not going to be flexible enough to use as anything else other than patch cables.
The BBC TV thing was a joke, im not that dumb.

glw · Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 4:32 pm Post subject:

Hey, what's wrong with UK Gold?

lee_UK · Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 12:01 am Post subject:

Well you pay a subscription fee to watch it, and its got adverts on.
of course if you have SKY plus you can skip the ads, but you pay a subs for sky plus.

1bassleft · Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 7:06 am Post subject:

Interesting thread. I have an even droopier jack than Tim's (I trod on it) - must upload a pic of it in use. Neither straight nor right-angled, it's about 45degree-angled jack.

In fairness to rewindspline he wrote

Quote:

if your cable has a signal core and a ground shield it is coax

(my italics). Not single core. While standard instrument cable is not a good idea for connecting power amp to cab (can't take the heat), the vice-versa isn't good either. Connecting guitar to amp with unshielded cable hums like Paula Radcliffe's marathon pants.

I remember a huge argie went around cables on "The Bottom Line" forum. A couple of caveats raised were that capacitance effects, once the maths are done, are restricted to frequencies that should be beyond our hearing. It might be a big deal with UHF (and hence TV coax is usually of high quality and often OFC) but not really in the 20Hz-20kHz range. OK, I'm a bass player with (usually) a low impedance, active output through a (by guitarist's standards) relatively uncomplicated path. But even with passive pups, tube amps and a fair number of interconnects, decent soldering and no kinks (remember those coiled leads?) are what you're hearing - not the reduced capacitance of xAWG OFMC cable.

As for amp to speaker cables, think Danny deVito in "Taxi". Keep it short (under 50ft) and thick.

Another player (and psychologist) warned of the "I know they're better so they sound better" effect. He did a "blind" test of various cables on players and their ability to distinguish them (apart from the obviously badly made) decreased markedly. I once installed different preamp valve makes "blind" (bit fiddly) and was surprised at the results of what I preferred over others.

1bassleft · Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 7:24 am Post subject:

BTW, anybody remember "thepedalboardguy" posting here? Very nice chap with some very nice, custom boards. Worth searching his posts if you like 'em nicely laid out.

Another thing. Speaking of satellite (and UKTV is 50% owned by the Beeb so you pay subscription, watch ads AND pay their licence fee), more harm is done to the GHz converted to mere MHz signal coming from your dish by the goons that install them than anything else. Crappy cable, badly sealed against water ingress (hugely affects impedance) and those regularly spaced metal clips they love to use have turned my Glasgow-rated 60cm dish into a tea saucer. My 1.4m dish in Spain is even worse - run down the length of the steel supporting beams and clipped to death. I'm too chicken to shimmy down 20m and re-route it.

lee_UK · Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:11 am Post subject:

Who was it on ebay selling coiled loopy guitar cables, and mentioned that using these cables would get you a bit closer to the 'Hendrix' tone?
How do they get away with it. Laughing

Bass, would you say that there are different grades of copper wire? and that OFC copper does benfit a guitars tone?

Also the inner core of my guitar cable is multistrand, and as far as i know, every cable ive ever owned is multistrand.

Gordy Smiff · Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:18 am Post subject:

Coiled loopy cable?
I've still got one that I use occasionally, when I'm desperate.

OFC cable is a watch word in the hi-fi industry, cleaner signal path etc.

But then, in the hi-fi industry "snake oil" was also a phrase much used, between various reps and their suppliers.

lee_UK · Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:39 am Post subject:

Our Bass player in 'Land' Gary is a Hi-Fi nut, he has custom made stuff, pre-amp is hand made and designed by a top amp designer, he has a pair of valve amps one sits behind the left speaker one behind the right speaker, the turntable is handmade, and he only plays vinyl, he never got caught up in the CD revolution, he has never owned a CD player (only in his PC) but has never bought a Music CD, always Vinyl, he told me his Speaker cable is solid Silver and he would have gone for solid gold if he could have afforded it, he swears there is a difference between silver and copper, but im not so sure.
The setup he has got now has taken him years to put together, but other than the cable he says there is nothing he would change, it is the best sounding Hi-Fi i have ever heard, much better than a good CD system.
But then for the cost of his system you could buy 25 tennis lessons from Britains ex-number one Jeremy Bates at £1,000 a lesson! Laughing

Gordy Smiff · Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:57 am Post subject:

Being ex hi-fi industry myself, I can see where your mate is coming from. Nothing beats the sound of analogue bass, even something like a Naim cd player pails into insignificance. Gold cables transfer sound at a much more efficient rate than copper. but there's the rub, the human ear can only differenciate to a degree, hence the "snake oil". Vinyl beats cd into a cocked hat, hands down, despite the "cleanness" of cd. The Sergeant Pepper album is a good case in point, at the end of the album, the "everlasting chord" part, the faders were turned up to such a degree thta you could hear the air conditiong units running, interesting stuff, but detracts from the original intention of why the music was made in the first place.

	GuitarSite.com Guitar Discussion Forum Index -> Guitar	All times are GMT Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Next
Page 5 of 6