Matt Wahl On-Line | Cable Test

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Cable Test

You may have figured out that I love music equipment! I have selected every piece of gear I use when I perform live for a specific reason. I’m constantly reading about, trying out and evaluating new gear to figure out what works the best for me. The only part of my live set up that has never gotten much attention is the cables. I don’t buy or use cheap cable but I have never given my cables much thought. I like to have mute switches on my XLR cables so I’ve found some of those and I’ve been using a Planet Waves Circuit Breaker 1/4” cable again for the mute switch but that is about as much thought as I’ve put into my cable selection.

About 2 weeks ago my main Planet Waves Circuit Breaker cable broke (the switch gave out.) I sent that in to get a replacement but it got me thinking that I should upgrade my cables. I decided to follow my Grandma’s advice to “buy expensive and cry once.” I bought Zaolla cables for all of my guitar connections. I got a 15’ 1/4” cable to go from my guitar to my stomp box tuner (Sonic Research Turbo Tuner ST-100,) a 6” cable to go from the tuner to my Radial JDI passive direct box and a 15’ XLR cable to go from the JDI to the board. Zaolla cables are expensive when compared to most of the “usual” brands and cables can be a controversial subject. Some claim to hear a difference, others swear there is no difference! My replacement Planet Waves Circuit Breaker cable arrived yesterday so I thought I’d do a little testing.

Test: This test is to see if there is a noticeable difference in the recordings of an acoustic guitar with Zaolla cables vs. other much less expensive cables.

Gear: Here is what I used to do the test:

Guitar: I used my new Cole Clark Fat Lady 2 in all of the samples. This Cole Clark has a Bunya top with Queensland Maple back and sides:

I plugged the Cole Clark into my Bose T1 ToneMatch Engine (Bose Mixer) and that is connected to a Bose L1 Compact.

The Recordings: I have my Bose L1 Compact set up in the corner of the room I use as an office/studio. I used a Zoom H2 to do all of these recordings. The Zoom is exactly 9’ away from the Bose and offset by 1’ to the right. I dumped all of the recordings into GarageBand on my MacBook Pro. I cleaned up the beginnings and endings of the samples but did nothing else to the recordings.

The Samples: I recorded 8 different samples. The first three are recordings of my Cole Clark plugged directly into the Bose T1 with a 1/4” cable. I used three different cables, my new Zaolla, a brand new Planet Waves Circuit Breaker cable and a generic, no-name 1/4” cable I had laying around. All of these cables are 15’ long. (not necessarily in that order in the sample player.)

The next two recordings are of the Cole Clark run through a Radial JDI passive direct box. In one of the recordings I used the Zaolla 1/4” to go from the guitar to the Radial JDI and then a 15’ Zaolla XLR cable to go from the Radial JDI to the Bose T1. In the other JDI recording I used the Planet Waves cable to go from the Cole Clark to the Radial JDI and then a 20’ XLR cable by Quantum Audio Designs to go from the Radial JDI to the Bose T1. (I couldn’t find another 15’ XLR cable.) (not necessarily in that order in the sample player.)

The final three recordings were inspired by a post on the Acoustic Guitar Forum saying that it might be a better test to record directly as opposed to recording the sound coming from a PA system. I do intend to use the Zaolla cables when I record but 99% of my cable use is done live, on-stage. So the “live” tests mean more to me than the “studio” tests but since someone suggested it, I included those too. All I did was record three samples, each with a different 1/4” cable plugged directly into my Apogee Duet audio interface.

The 1/4” to Bose T1 samples are labeled Quarter Inch Direct and the 1/4” to JDI to Bose T1 are called Quarter Inch To JDI w/XLR. The “direct” recordings are called “Quarter Inch To Apogee Duet, Samples 1, 2 and 3. I thought it might be fun to see if folks can tell the difference without knowing what they are hearing. I’ll put the “answers” up soon.

You can hear the sample recordings by using the player below. The samples are best heard with some decent headphones:

Conclusion: I’m going to post this on the Acoustic Guitar Forum and see if anyone wants to try their ear at finding the Zaolla cables. I’ll post my conclusion after people have had a chance to guess so I don’t give anything away. Thanks for reading and listening!