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Re: interconnects

3 m is an answer I have seen before but it depends upon a number of things. Primary considerations are capacitance and shielding.

Your cartridge will be designed to work best into a load with a certain capacitance. The load capacitance will be made up of the capacitance between the cartridge and the turntable connectors, the interconnect, and the capacitance at the phono preamp. The last two will I expect be the most significant.
For maximum length, you need the following:
1 A cartridge designed for a fairly high capacitance.
2 Cable with a low capacitance / ft
3 A phono pre with adjustable or removeable capacitance

If you don't have the cartridge yet, make capacitance loading one of the selection issues

For cheap low capacitance cable I would use video rather than audio cable. I have a black 1.95m Radio Shack AV cable that measures 90pF on all three conductors. I guess that they just used 3 runs of video cable. For Phono use, I guess that you can you can remove the RCAs from the the video interconnect and use it for your earth. I'm pretty sure that this will be readily available in longer lengths. With the right cartridge and preamp, you would probably be fine with this up to 5m or so.

You may not have a choice on your phono pre but variable capacitance was quite common on the better old preamps.

The importance of shielding will depend upon how much RF there is in your location and the output level of your cartridge. In general the longer the interconnect then the better the shielding needs to be.

You will find previous posts on this issue if you do a search.

Regards

David




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  • Re: interconnects - energyandair 03/26/0410:33:52 03/26/04 (0)


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