Vintage combo amps...new speaker cable

[john archer]

I have two BFDRS which sound good...but in gear page fashion I like to experiment with different things. One of these things is the original speaker cable. Has anyone tried to put new high quality cable(monster for ex.) in there. Is there a difference in sound quality?

[brad347]

hoo boy, get ready for it to fly on this one! ;)

My personal opinion:

Guitar amps reproduce nothing over about 6k on a good day. I use high-quality Mogami balanced cable going from my audio interface to my studio monitors, and can hear a slight difference over cheapie cable, but all of that difference is in the high end, well over what a guitar amp reproduces.

I can get pretty fetishistic and snake-oily, but I use regular old run-of-the-mill lamp cord in my guitar amps for speaker cable. It works fine and sounds great. There are a million things you could do to your amp to milk the last bit of tone out of it before going and dropping 30-50 bucks on a speaker cable. You might as well be replacing the input jack. That money would be much better spent on one nice preamp tube.

Edit: The balanced Mogami cable is shielded anyhow, so that's not comparing apples to apples. See my post below.

[vibroverbus]

+1 to the max.

'specially the lamp cord. in fact 'zip cord' is often perfectly high quality copper stranded wire.

more to say but didn't want to put the Nomex suit on...

[brad347]

another point to bring up:

Shielded cable is more critical than unshielded cable. Unshielded cable (like you use to hook up your guitar speakers) is just... wire. There's nothing to interact. It's just a strand or strands of copper wire.

Shielded cable on the other hand is another story. In shielded cable, there is one or more conductors surrounded by a braided copper shield that is grounded on the end. Here, capacitance becomes a concern. Since a capacitor is by definition "two conductors separated by a non-conductor," then your shielded cable (like you use to hook up your guitar to your amp) is in effect one long capacitor. The lower the capacitance the better.

The reason is, a capacitor will let alternating current signals through but will block DC current. Audio signal is an alternating current signal. This means that the capacitance in the cable will actually let some of the high end of your signal "jump over" to the braided shield, effectively shunting it off to ground. Just like putting a bright cap on your volume control, the tiny value capacitor will let only the highest frequencies jump over, thus "dulling" your sound. The key is to get "low-capacitance" shielded cable, the goal being to get the value of capacitance small enough that the only audio signal that gets shunted to ground is out of the range of hearing.

BUT since speaker wire is unshielded, there would be NO capacitance and that wouldn't be a concern.

RE: the shielded cable/capacitance issue. Some people say that since guitars don't reproduce high frequencies well anyway, even the guitar cables shouldn't have that much effect. In my personal experience I haven't found this to be the case. True, most guitar speakers don't reproduce over 6k or so (and that's generous), BUT stuff happens in the amplifier at ALL frequencies, even those that don't get reproduced by the speaker, that affect the way the amp sounds. Case in point: Ever had an amp with a parasitic oscillation that you couldn't hear but that was making the amp sound weak? it was sapping the power. Well, if you have those high frequencies in your signal, they will affect how the tubes and trannys are pushed even if that actual part of the signal doesn't get reproduced too well by the speaker(s). This could (and in my expereince, does) affect what comes out in the frequencies the speaker DOES reproduce. With low-capacitance cable, you are in effect hitting the amp with MORE signal from your guitar, since less is getting shunted to ground via the shield.

[jrigg]

I used to be a zip cord advocate. Then I tried the Mulder Audio speaker cables. If you haven't tried one, you have no idea what a difference they can make. Gary offers your money back if you don't like the cable.