Audio cables are'nt quite as critical as video cables but I dont know how many 1000 ft rolls I have used. One of my major projects was moving a tv studio into the transmitter building out on hill outside of town. We literally made cables for audio and video and wired a complete tv station. With video you have set delays in the video switcher to get all in sync. Of course all the audio is 600 ohm balanced. Rg49 video cable is double shielded with 2 layers of braided shield around the center conductor. It is hard to comb out As a cable ages (i worked some aboard ship it was a cruiser original comission '42) the copper corrodes and is no longer shiny..It takes alot of solder flux to make a good connection to ground. So the first lesson is the solder connection between the wire and terminal is probably the most important thing . Both should be shiny and clean...Things like a Techtronix scope actually requires silver solder which takes a higher temp.. Short cables like hooking up rack components arent real critical in fact I go to the shack and buy these/
with 2 1/4' plugs cut in half then cit for length and sollder the 1/4' plug on the bare ends . This gives 2 hookup cables. On some things like the bbe362 and aphex 204 I actually hard wire one end to one or the other..
Yea I know the pros use monster cable and one that starts with a "c" which I cant tthink of.. If a cable has a woven shield (2 are better) and it is soldered correctly to the xlr or whatever it is good for balanced, single ended for long lengths.. Anything beyond that engineering wise requires knowing the resistivy per foot and output impedance of the amp and input impedance of whatever which I would have to break out one of my dusty books to figure that out again..
It took a whole beer to do this post
