As an audio engineer I can confirm that shielding is more important in a cable than whether or not it has gold plated connectors. Gold plated connectors don’t really do much unless the connectors are worn down and don’t make good contact in the first place, shielding actually does something for signal to noise ratio, especially for unbalanced and/or mic level(low level signal) and/or long cables. This is really only applicable for analog stuff for the most part of course.
Not an audio engineer, but I had unshielded (thin) cables in my home speaker setup. If the cables were positioned correctly, everything was fine. Accidentally move them even a little, and there’d be a huge amount of noise, due to power cables going near the speaker cables. Switched to shielded (thick) cables, and there’s no noise ever.
Shielding has to do with the orientation of the ground wire in the cable versus the signal wire. In a shielded cable the ground wire completely surrounds the signal wire like a pipe. In an unshielded cable the ground wire is wrapped around the signal wire or run next to it.
You laugh, but I once had a Future Shop employee try to sell me an expensive toslink cable by saying it had electromagnetic shielding. I replied that it’s light, for him to say that emp affect light. I laughed in his face, leaving with the cheap one.
Even if it does affect light (which I’m not actually sure about since light is EMR) it’s irrelevant because the signal is digital. It only matters whether a 0 or 1 can be interpreted on the other end, which a bit of wiggle won’t change.
Fool! Those cables aren’t even shielded from electromagnetic radiation! I can literally hear the cosmic background noise of the universe it’s so bad.
As an audio engineer I can confirm that shielding is more important in a cable than whether or not it has gold plated connectors. Gold plated connectors don’t really do much unless the connectors are worn down and don’t make good contact in the first place, shielding actually does something for signal to noise ratio, especially for unbalanced and/or mic level(low level signal) and/or long cables. This is really only applicable for analog stuff for the most part of course.
Not an audio engineer, but I had unshielded (thin) cables in my home speaker setup. If the cables were positioned correctly, everything was fine. Accidentally move them even a little, and there’d be a huge amount of noise, due to power cables going near the speaker cables. Switched to shielded (thick) cables, and there’s no noise ever.
Shielding has to do with the orientation of the ground wire in the cable versus the signal wire. In a shielded cable the ground wire completely surrounds the signal wire like a pipe. In an unshielded cable the ground wire is wrapped around the signal wire or run next to it.
Cables that are shielded like this are coaxial.
Sir, this is an S/PDIF cable.
Side note. How do you pronounce that. Cause I just said spdif as one syllable
Are you American or Czech?
American…
Czech
Yeah, but are they gold plated?
You laugh, but I once had a Future Shop employee try to sell me an expensive toslink cable by saying it had electromagnetic shielding. I replied that it’s light, for him to say that emp affect light. I laughed in his face, leaving with the cheap one.
Even if it does affect light (which I’m not actually sure about since light is EMR) it’s irrelevant because the signal is digital. It only matters whether a 0 or 1 can be interpreted on the other end, which a bit of wiggle won’t change.