Tone arm cables, what should I choose?

[decca4]

I have recently bought some vintage tone arms. One is an old Gray 108C uni-pivot and the other one is a Gray clone namely Argonne. They both are in desperate need of new cables.

I was considering shielded Cardas but was made aware of that they use teflon as isolation of the cables. Although good as isolation material teflon is rather stiff and probably unsuitable for these tone arms. Do you have any suggestions as to what would be suitable and possibly addresses to suppliers? For those not familiar with the Gray type tone arms here are some pictures of my Gray and the Argonne. Your help would be most appreciated.

[wer]

The four wires in one shield Cardas i have is a stiff SOB, not because of the Teflon of the wires, but the braided shielding and outer insulation.
Looking at your arms i doubt whether you need much shielding anyhow  

[decca4]

The four wires in one shield Cardas i have is a stiff SOB, not because of the Teflon of the wires, but the braided shielding and outer insulation.
Looking at your arms i doubt whether you need much shielding anyhow  

You have convinced me Werner, Cardas is out. The lower tone arm on the second picture probably does not need any shielding but the upper one is open downwards and therefore probably sensitive to hum. But what is there to choose from? I am looking for some decent copper cable. The silver cables that I have heard have not impressed me at all.

[richard]

I'm amazed by how consistently so many audiophiles ignore a basic concern:
What is the cartridge manufacturer's recommended capacitance load for this cartridge? All other questions should come after this one. If this capacitance is wrong, your cartridge won't sound its best.

Capacitance between the cartridge and your preamp's inputs is cumulative: the longer the cable, the higher the capacitance. Different cables provide different amounts of capacitance per unit of length. It's really good to own (or borrow) a decent capacitance meter that can read low picofarads accurately.

Cable capacitance is added to the capacitance of the preamp's input circuit. It is usually very difficult or impossible to measure this successfully, so hopefully, the manufacturer has provided this figure. Unfortunately, many manufacturers haven't condescended to tell us! So, we may have to estimate or apply the trial-and-error method. But, at least, it's good to get those wires at or below what the cartridge maker tells us (and the cartridge makers have usually been good about providing this information).

It's really easy to add capacitance; it can be very difficult to remove it.

[vinyl flipper]

Hi Stefan,

A couple of years ago, I went on a tonearm wire replacement binge. I did some search and found that Cardas 33ga was the most widely used wire for tonearm rewiring. I also found many people liked Incognito. Ikeda and van den Hul also caught my eye.

I eventually settled on Cardas. I used both separate wires and the shielded 4-wire version for different jobs. 

Despite the stiffness of the shielded Cardas, it's still suitable for tone arm wiring imo, and you can always unbraid lengths of it for better flexibility as I did for my Versa Dynamics Model 1. For my SME, I used separate wires since they ran through the arm tube.

If flexibility and hum are real problems, you can roll your own stranded cable thinner than 33ga using multiple micron-thin wires. And you can judiciously use lengths of braided shield to control hum without adding too much stiffness to the cable.

I found all my diy supplies for my tonearm rewire project from Michael Percy's fantastic catalog. Take a look if you haven't seen one.

http://www.percyaudio.com/Catalog.pdf

[hatehifi]

I'd go with Vic's, having read so much good things about it here and having met and admiring him whom I found (good ears...). BTW, go for the pins too.

http://www.trans-fi.com/ 'click' under "EBay"

Write him about shielding, capacitance, etc.

Cheers!

[lexi]

  Re wired a few arms with Vics stuff. Nice. Slightly tricky with the soldering mind.
  Those big arms look great for re-wiring, unlike the key hole surgery involved in low mass arms.

   After a bit of practice with a Michell arm I was able to wallpaper my hall through the front letterbox 

[wer]

Despite the stiffness of the shielded Cardas, it's still suitable for tone arm wiring imo, and you can always unbraid lengths of it for better flexibility as I did for my Versa Dynamics Model 1. For my SME, I used separate wires since they ran through the arm tube.

I just looked at the second arm, where the wire exits very much off-centre. A stiff(ish) cable would be more of a problem there than if it went through the axis.

[itskeith]

Hi Richard,

Ref:

I'm amazed by how consistently so many audiophiles ignore a basic concern:
What is the cartridge manufacturer's recommended capacitance load for this cartridge? All other questions should come after this one. If this capacitance is wrong, your cartridge won't sound its best ................ etc

Yes - that would include me then. A little wiser now and thanks for sharing 
 
Keith

[old woody]

What is the cartridge manufacturer's recommended capacitance load for this cartridge

Richard I have been thinking about this as i need to replace some cable myself ....most of these old arms were made with sliders to use with different cartridges GE,Pickering,Tannoy,Fairchild amongst others so unless every one of these carts has the same capacitance which i very much doubt it begs the question did the original tonearm manufacturers pay any attention to the capacitance of the wire used in there tonearms or in fact just used a industry standard cable ..what do you think ?

[decca4]

Thanks guys for wisdom and good advice!

Richard talks about capacitance in the cable and although this can be a concern I really can't see how I can affect this with different choices of cables inside the tone arm if the cables are of the same size (33AWG) or can I?

Andy no I had not seen that catalogue. It is really something like a mine of interesting stuff! I have already found a lot of tempting items and will bookmark it. Your experience in those matters are always valuable. You are suggesting that I could make my own cable. That is not an option! When I am handling delicate things like this I fell like I am wearing boxing gloves.

The Trans-fi cable looks like a very attractive option. Prices are also very affordable compared to the Cardas. I will probably order some.

As to cartridges my intention is to use IKEDA, Win and Panasonic Strain Gauge and also give the Decca 4s a try. Oh and I forgot the Denon 102, my first true mono cartridge.

I will have to dwell on this a bit more but may be I should except for the Trans-fi cable also order an unshielded Cardas cable and just shield that where it needs to be done.

I am a total new be on this subject but it still amazes me that half a meter of cable can have an affect on the sound when in the recording studio may be 50 meters was used.

I am very much open to your suggestions and advice

[Velvetsunrise]

Hi,
I use Vics Litz wire, as recomended to me by others on LH. Twisted but unshielded. One uninterupted run from cartridge to preamp. Unshielded wooden wand and zero hum with DL103 and 62dB preamp gain. Sounded better than solid silver to my ears. Nice and flexible too!

Probably hum like hell with a mm though.

[richard]

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!

Woody has asked a "bingo" question. Thanks, Woody: now you've got me focused. I know (and respect) what Woody likes to do and how he goes about it; Woody's process, if you will. Everyone else, listen up, y'hear? (We're going to get better sound, remove some of the voodoo, and save some money. Are you OK with that?)

First, to your direct question, Woody, here's what was going on:
1. You are exploring classic professional arms used in broadcast studios. This equipment was installed by engineers who knew what they were doing and applied sane logic. They did not just throw money at expensive (fill in the blank) because someone else said that they liked it. We're dealing with variables, and just because Joe Sixpack likes the Gray-Blue-Gold cartridge with his heavy metal doesn't mean that Farthing Wigglethorp's Himilayan "World Music" is going to sound great with his $4000 inverted coil pickup and his $8,000 interconnects.
2. Broadcast practice was to put the preamp very close to the arm. This helps to override noise pickup and excess capacitance from long cables. Again, these guys are not just throwing money at stuff: their brains are in gear.
3. I can't talk about other professional preamps, but I have worked in radio, and I own three professional preamps. My preamps all contain their own switchable capacitors. Remember, it is easy to add capacitance, hard to reduce it.
4. But unlike Woody, broadcasters didn't constantly change cartridges: they needed to be able to swap out a cartridge for another one of the same type. After all, if you go back far enough in the LP era, you had to dismount the cartridge in order to change the needle! This is a true PITA! So, they needed to be able to keep the equipment on-the-air while tending to a cartridge. That's the main reason for the removable "sleds."
5. But Woody is on a quest to try out many cartridges, to explore what they can do, how they sound.

*** What should Woody do? ***

1. Make up a list of all your cartridges and their recommended load capacitances.
2. Select the cartridge with the lowest recommended load. This will be your standard.

Example:  almost all of the Stanton and Pickering cartridges that are described in my Handbook have a recommended capacitance load of 275 picofarads. I have some Shures, too. These Shures use 400pF load. I have cartridges from Micro Acoustics and the unusual Stanton/Pickering low-impedance, low output cartridges; these are non-typical products, virtually load-insensitive, so capacitance almost doesn't matter for them. My lowest load is the 275pF of the standard Stantons and Pickerings.

Therefore, 275 picofarads is my standard capacitance load. I will plan my wiring around this figure. Our total cabling between the cartridge and the preamp must not exceed this capacitance, especially considering that the preamp's input circuit is going to add some picofarads. Typically, we're going to have to accept the wire inside the arm because that's where we need flexibility and small size: this means high capacitance, and we'll have to keep these leads short. So, it's in the leads between the arm wires and the preamp where we will be able to impart some control. Inside the arm, we may be able to accept shielding that's not the best, because it's surrounded by the shielding provided by the metal of the arm itself. But, unfortunately, the proximity of all this metal is going to add more real-world capacitance load.

So, to choose the wiring between the turntable and the preamp, let's say, if we don't know the actual capacitance of the preamp, allow 40 picofarads for that input circuit. If we're going to use any of the cartridges in my book, we're going to need a total load in the wires of 235 pF to achieve that Stanton/Pickering figure: 275 pF.

If we don't know the capacitance of these wires, we're working in the dark, and our results will probably be wrong. And we won't know how our cartridges really sound.

It really helps to make up our own wires, to put the plugs onto them ourselves, because we can cut them to achieve the capacitance load that we want. We do need good shielding between the turntable and the preamp, so this is important when we choose our cables. What some people have tried with poorly-shielded cables is to surround them with grounded aluminum foil. It looks horrible, but this can work.

The least crazy-making way to go about this is to select wire with extremely low capacitance. You can always add capacitance to achieve your goal.

Back to Woody's situation. Having selected the inter-component cable to achieve the loading for his lowest-spec cartridge, for his higher-spec cartridges, he can simply add tiny capacitors right at the cartridges to make up the difference. This way, when he changes his headshells with the cartridges in them, he'll maintain his matching. It's easy and cheap.

Examples of wire suitable for phono work that I have on hand right now are:
- Some nameless fat wire from Taiwan at 20 picofarads per foot
- Some medium-thin Belden cable at 8 picofarads per foot (this is an almost-unreal achievement).

One further thing about the preamps: it is often possible to learn the input capacitance just by looking at the capacitor that's across the inputs. However, not all preamps use only one or two parts ahead of the first stage of gain (the transistor, tube, IC, etc.). If there's a jungle of parts here, you've got to depend on the builder for the answer. Note that I am not a board-level circuit-head, so I welcome input about measuring this from someone who is! As far as I know, standard capacitance meters cannot measure the capacitance of typical circuitry. I hope that I'm wrong. There are many cables out in the world that will give us loading that is wildly incorrect for our cartridges. I bought a special meter.

Sanity Talk:
- It's not necessary to get the capacitance right on the nose. There's some wiggle room here. The manufacturer is thinking in an approximation, and it's likely that you're going to have to guess about the preamp part of this. There will also be slight differences in windings from one coil to another inside the cartridge, and this is part of the approximations involved in this pursuit. If you do want to achieve complete perfection, you may want to do extensive testing and very precise loading.
- Scott has done exhaustive listening tests, and so, in honor of his work, an approach that I can suggest with phono systems, is to get the capacitance load in a sensible range for every set of leads that are being evaluated. I'm sure that Scott already does this, but I'm mentioning this here as a suggestion for anyone who wants to do cartridge "interconnect rolling."

It's very helpful to own (or borrow) a suitable capacitance meter. Note that most meters that have capacitance capability cannot measure picofarads as low as the range that's involved with magnetic phono cartridges. You'll probably have to use a dedicated capacitance-only meter to work with this range.

OK, Woody?
Everyone else, your comments are very welcome!

(c) 2014 Richard Steinfeld

[old woody]

Richard my friend it was Stefan ( Decca4 ) that posed the question about cable , but yes what a wonderful reply,but and a big but what if as you suggest i changed the load of every different cartridge every time i played it....  would they not all end up sounding the same ? think about all these guys upgrade there cartridges every time from say the measly stanton 500 to the 881 and onwards and upwards do they change there arm cable every time ...NO and they all claim that its a much better sound and a improvement or is it just the fact the capacitance is different ? the point i'm trying to make is there are too many variables in the chain of music reproduction to claim it would make it  better it just makes it different  imo

for me its pretty simple I don't worry about cable or any other stuff like that i just like playing period records with period cartridges .....period  lol and as long as it doesn't hum like buggery i don't care ...my experience with Litz was terrible it hummed like nothing on earth especially in a metal arm with a high output VR cartridge

and btw i love your fictitious names " farthing wigglethrop " what a great name now wouldn't it be funny if he was real

[ecosprog]

While I would not disagree with anything you have said Richard, I really wonder how much difference there will be in real world listening between the optimal theoretical loading as apposed to the real world situations you have in the average setup.

Take mine for example. I have a Stanton 681 EEE MkII-S cartridge in a Fidelity Research FR-54 tonearm with its original tonearm wire so I have no idea what the capacitance is, but we will go with the estimate you used above of 40pF. I have used my low capacitance cable to run from the base of the tonearm to the phono stage. This cable is rated at 65pF/m, and the run is 50cm, which give a capacitance of 32.5pF. I don´t know what the input capacitance of my EAR 834p clone phono stage is, but lets assume it´s 100pF. So, that gives us roughly 40+35+100=175pF.

So, in the example above will I notice an audible difference if I change the loading at the phono stage. What I am getting at here is the difference between a theoretical ideal that an engineer comes up with, and a real world situation. This is a bit of a rhetorical question because the answer is ´try it´. The problem is that we don´t know the real capacitance values of the tonearm cable, or the phono preamp. The, as Paul has pointed out, when you change cartridges you will probably through the whole setup out of theoretical whack, and you need to change things again.

My gut feeling to this kind of stuff is simply to keep the cable run from tonearm to phono stage as short as possible and then just sit back and enjoy the music. I will add the proviso that if you are considering cable runs of over 1m then maybe it is worth worrying about the capacitance issue.

Maybe my problem is that I am not anal enough to be a real audiophile. Proof of this is my inability to find this mysterious thing called PRaT. Is there a button somewhere on my Lenco that I need to push?