I've been hearing a lot of talk about low capacitance mic cables and how much better they sound - that got me wondering. I know the Canare L4E6S is fairly high (46 pf/ft), but what does that really mean to me?
I put one of my trusty Oktava MK012s face to face with the tweeter on one of my monitors. Ran a 15' Canare cable to the Mackie 1402 mixer I user for routing in my studio.
In Audition I created a 1-second white-noise sample. I also added 3 single-sample ticks.
I recorded that sample through the 15' Canare cable.
I then chained a bunch of Canare cables together totalling 260' and recorded the exact same sample under the exact same conditions (except the lenth of wire).
Here are the resulting recordings.
http://www.cheap-tracks.com/mp3/15_foot_canare.wav http://www.cheap-tracks.com/mp3/260_foot_canare.wav
The files are 24-bit packed - I can upload a different format if this gives folks trouble.
I used Adobe Audition to analyse the files. Frequency plots are almost identical They begin to deviate a fair amount when things get below 25 Hz (not much material down there as I was recording the tweeter). Also, there is a small deviation between the two recordings a few hundred hertz either side of 1800. Other than that they are line-on-line.
The recordings do not null when one is inverted on another, but the resulting file seems to be uniform in frequency distribution. If I zoom in on the timeline to where there are only a few samples on the screen, I can see a definite delay - apparently due to the length of the cable - on the 260 ft sample. The delay is too small for me to measure - nor do I think I can compensate for it in the software. This delay, however, would expain why the files do not null.
Anyway - do your own comparison. - analyze, A/B test, etc.
Share your thoughts.