Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Don: Is it necessary to design bass cables any differently than guitar cables in order to maximize the signal from the instrument to the amplifier.

Peter; I would think that since bass is primarily a lower freq. that the requirments would be a bit more oriented towards those. I'll ask Tony @ Evidence Audio and post his reply. I know Munster Cable has made a small fortune getting bass players to think that....I know when I was at SWR the standard rule of thumb was to reproduce bass freq. took 4x more more to achive the same volume level as a guitar. I would imagine a cable designed to help that along would be appreciated by bass players.

I like the Monster Cable P-500 Bass cable because it has considerably lower microphonics than the P-500 Rock guitar cable and is thus better suited to high gain GUITAR work. It matters when you have 20+ feet of cable in use. Otherwise, it measures and sounds almost identical to the Rock cable that MC sells.

Bass is only one octave lower than guitar. It makes a big difference in speaker design, but matters very little in electrical cable design. All other things being equal, of course.

It has more to do with marketing than any sound difference I have ever heard. Good audiophile cable sounds better on EVERYTHING when it is right.

O.K. Here's the info/reply I got from Tony @ Evidence Audio. Seems very logical and pretty well right on the mark to me. I'll paraphrase some info but quote his whole last paragraph answer he wanted used.
"Maybe I'm a cynical ******* but in my view the "bass guitar cable", "rock guitar cable" and jazz guitar cable" story is a way of solving problems that don't exsist.
Well, I guess it isn't easy if you think that cables should be used as tone controls and you should shape your rig's E.Q. with cables rather than...well, an E.Q."
His one paragraph answer:
Choosing certain design features for a cable will benefit bass frequencies in terms of dynamics, pitch defintion, dimensnality and clarity, in the same way they benefit high frequencies. The only real distinction is that the cross-sectional area(size of conductor) has a higher priority, and the use of highly refined copper has a lower priority. If I made a "piccolo" cable I'd worry more about conducting material and less about AWG.
And again...disregard all this if you want to use cables as tone controls. But personally, I'd play with cabinet position before I worried about swapping cables every gig. It's cheaper in the long run."
He also included a bit about bass notes.."Besides, there is a LOT of harmonic information coming out of a bass that gets played out in the mids and higher frequencies. How those harmonics sound in large part effect our perception of the bass notes.
Makes sense to me. I know personally that his cables sound better than anything else I've used.

P.T. Barnum must have had the Monster Cable folks in mind when he made his famous statement. Their cables are okay but way overpriced.

I would never buy one of their products because they started harrassing and suing every business under the sun using the name Monster. It was gross abuse of the legal system, and it's too bad they couldn't be sanctioned and their attorneys disbarred. Read about one man's fight against them here: http://www.madmartian.com/legal/

Now, I'll throw in someone else's .02 on cables and myths about cables: http://www.guitarnuts.com/technical/cords/index.html

Thanks for the link, Dave.

From the worst to the best cable I have in my possession, I found out last night that setting a couple of closed cardboard boxes next to one of my bass loudspeakers (I play through a stereo bass rig) simply sucked out the sound at certain frequencies far worse than any cable ever did. I thought that my left speaker was blown. I switched speakers. Same problem in the left channel still. Took the boxes away. Problem gone. Put the boxes beside the right speaker. Now the problem is in the right channel. The cardboard flexes easily and forms a filter at a certain resonant frequency. I remember reading about listening room wall flexure in an audiophile magazine, and how you needed rigid walls to get good bass in a room (build your next house from poured concrete if you are a bass player) . The magazine suggested plywood walls at least 3/4" thick and closely spaced 2x6 studs about a foot apart. How many of us play in such strongly constructed rooms?

These were just a couple of little boxes holding a couple of new Tube 12 amps I had fixed up and was storing in my bedroom. If two little cardboard boxes can make such a difference, what is the rest of the room doing to the sound???

I repeat, I haven't heard the magnitude of differences that people relate to interconnects, and I am an audiophile with some rather fancy gear. Acoustic treatments and contact enhancements are a different story, however. I can make furniture rattle like a Model T going down a bumpy gravel road when I turn up the bass. Cables can't fix that.

Dave,

What an unbelievable bunch of abuse that company engaged in! Even if I did believe the **** about needing 00 AWG, super-cooled, hypo-oxygenated, platinum plated, thermoset triple-insulated, mega-braided, quadrupled shielded, beryllium-doped, 99 44/100% pure cables for the 3 foot speaker line from my 50 watt stereo, I'd never buy anything from a company like that.

Thanks for the Monsterous* info!



*Register trademark of blah, blah, blah ....

Don: Thanks for passing this information on. The bottom line from Tony would seem to be:

Choosing certain design features for a cable will benefit bass frequencies in terms of dynamics, pitch defintion, dimensionality and clarity, in the same way they benefit high frequencies.

In short, it would seem that a technically sound and well-built cable will, for the most part, serve the electric bass and guitar equally well.

Peter; Yes, it seems to me that any well made, well thought out cable should work for Any instrument. I'm quite happy with the Evidence Audio cables. I have a number of their cables that all sound great. The mic cables are unbelievable! I was a bit of a Doubting Thomas on those until I tried it side by side with the standard **** you get when you buy a Shure or a Sennhieser mic. The clarity and dynamic range are amazing. My 30 year old SM-58 sounded like a totally different mic. It's always been a great sounding mic but sounds even better now! I've got speaker cables and short effects patch cables as well as 3-guitar stage lenght cables.