The size of the internal wire, solder connection, strain relief, and especially the cable shield size are all factors.
The shield is most critical if you look at the length of wire an miniscule power of any instrument without a powered preamp. Even with a built in preamp the output impedance will be high from most circuits.
Think of it this way, high impedance is another way of saying there is a voltage signal but not much current is able to flow to or from the device. If you try to pull or push too much current the signal will disappear. When there is not much current flowing, the signal is much more susceptible to other signals and noise crossing the wire.
Most 3.5mm audio connectors have poor shielding, strain relief, and the actual connection points where the wires are soldered are terrible. With the way they are constructed, the solder connection must be done very quickly to avoid damaging the thin plastic insulation between the rings that make up the tip terminal. With the larger quarter inch connector, there is a lot more heat mass in the actual terminals and there is enough room to make solder terminals with heat isolation. This helps to match the terminal with a larger wire gage so that both surfaces can evenly wet with solder with a properly set iron temperature. In theory this leads to a far more robust connection.
Most 3.5mm cables are unshielded. This is fine for the low impedance (high current flow) of an amplifier output stage, but it is totally insufficient for the high impedance input of an instrument.
This is why instrument cables generally cost so much more too. You’re buying more copper, an engineered cable that has more that just wires in an extruded plastic sleeve, and the connectors are special purpose, beefier, and more engineered for a specialty task.
Thanks that was a very clear explanation, i appreciate you ❤
Add to all that, back to the dawn of electric guitar, 1/4 inch connectors were simply much more common and readily available.
It became the defacto standard because its what was always used.
While jumping and running on scene you want something sturdy not a whimpy 3.5mm jack.
Some folks don’t work shows and it shows 😜
gig boys
Because 3.5mm jacks suck. 6.3mm jacks are much more sturdy and can be easily mounted on 6mm or even thicker cable, which can also handle much more use.
Flimsy jack and thin cheap cable cable is asking for trouble during performance.
The only plus of 3.5mm and smaller ‘phone jacks’ is their size and in many applications it is much less important than reliability.
Don’t adapters exist?
They do and make reliability even worse.
I cant imagin how many 3.5 cables I’d have ruined onstage…they are simplynot stromg enough.
It would get pulled out or the skinny little cord would break almost immediately
The 1/4" jacks became standard before metric ruled the world. Besides, 1/4" jacks are way sturdier than 3.5mm posts. Now if the metric guys came up with a 7.0mm jack - we can talk transition.
why aren’t phones and shit made with 1/4" jacks instead of 3.5mm jacks?
Ftfy: why aren’t phones made with jacks?
If the only tool you have is a jack, every problem looks like a pallet.
Phones ≠ pallets
honestly, i had completely forgotten that some phones, for some completely unfathomable reason, lack an audio jack of any kind. if you are suffering through that, you have my condolences.
Because good luck finding a phone nowadays that’s at a bit thicker than 1/4". (It’s a shame really; I kinda miss those older, thicker phones…)
Would be better with XLR, but anyway, the jack is the standard that was used in the very first electric guitars.
I’m not sure why they chose that one at the time, but it was the same kind of connection used in telephone boards, so it was already a standard for audio long before the invention of electric guitars. The jack was invited in 1877. Makes sense to use something that already existed and had proven to be reliable and available.
The reason they’re still used is for backward compatibility. Other cabled instruments and microphones have changed standards through the years, but because guitars need to be paired with all kinds of amplifiers and stomp boxes from various manufacturers from different decades, it’s impossible for one brand to change the standard.
A curious fact is that the 1/4 jack is the longest running connection standard.
With many professionals using wireless cables these days, it could more easily be changed, but at the same time, since going without a cable also removes many of the issues with the jack, there’s really no need to change it.
why xlr?
It locks, is more durable and balanced.
balanced?
It reduces noise from interference.
An unbalanced cable has two wires. A ground and the signal. The audio is the difference between the two. A guitar cable is unbalanced.
A balanced cable has 3 wires. A ground, a signal (+ hot) and a signal with opposite polarity (- cold). The receiver will flip the polarity of the cold signal and add the two signals. The result is that any interference that happens in the cable is also flipped on the cold signal and thereby cancels the interference on the hot signal.
Put in like math: let’s say your audio is 3x and noise is 0.5y An unbalanced cable would deliver 3x + 0.5y =noise being added to the output.
A balanced cable would deliver “hot” 3x + 0.5y and “cold” -3x +0.5y. The receiver flips the cold resulting in 3x+0.5y +3x -0.5y =6x + 0y. This can then be divided by 2 resulting in the correct 3x and no noise.
the guitar input is unbalanced?
Yeah, a guitar output is a mono unbalanced two wire 1/4" TS jack.
Of course there are people who make guitars with custom wiring, but the standard is TS. 2 wires: tip and sleeve.
You can use a stereo/balanced TRS jack with 3 wires,? (Tip, Ring Sleeve) but only because those are sort of compatible with TS. It won’t actually be balanced.
so whyd you start off with saying it’s balanced if it’s unvalanced andbwhy dont guitars come balacned
I wonder if it would be possible to use some jacks and a couple of cables to run Ethernet.
I guess so. The phoneline in my house only has two wires (middle pair of a rj11) so it could work just as well on a guitar cable. It runs at 20/2 mb, which is about maximum for this sort of line. Works alright for TV streaming and office work, but it’s too slow for keeping up with the daily gigabytes of game updates.
Cuz quarter inch jackets are for mice
(and dainty jacks fall out. You can get an adapter if you really want it)
I think it’s purely durability. Larger cords are harder to snap.
Why not rj45 or coax?
Why not bayonet?
You find that one out quickly when something yanks the cable hard.
You just have to yank back harder!
There’s always a bigger yank somewhere.
Why not USB?
So this comes down to the fundamental question of why is everything in music still so analog in this digital age? I was genuinely surprised when I first joined a band and found how archaic everything seemed to be. Even the terminology sounded vaguely steam punk. Condenser? You mean a capacitor?
I think historically, the problem was that anything that adds latency to your signal is bad news when you are performing. As a musician, any human-perceptible level of delay can throw you off your game, but there is also the possibility of unwanted sound artifacts coming out of things being slightly out of phase.
That said, I think things have come along far enough now that digital cabling could work on stage? They would have some advantages in that electrical noise would presumably be less of an issue with error-correcting protocols once the signal is in digital form? USB could be bad at the sampling point though if there is electrical noise in its power supply.
But I am not a sound engineer. I’m curious what others think about this? As a violin/fiddle guy, those 1/4" cables really weigh down the instrument and I think about this stuff from time to time.
Something weird with guitarist is that we want that bad fuzzy sound from low tech analog amplifiers. With today tech we can have high fidelity amps (even analog). However, we want some distorsion/grain ideally the same as on violonistes have an obsession for century old varnish, electric guitarists are obsessed by vintage electronic. To be fair all the issues from early electronic are what made the electric guitar sound cool.
Then another factor is that for a while, digital effect were pretty bad, and still have that reputation, they also look less cool than analog
I hear ya. I play in a celtic rock band where the violin basically fills the ecological niche of a lead guitar for instrumentals. So while I tend to prefer a clean acoustic sound, I do have a few pedals to add distortion and such.
Analog connections are very universal. You don’t need to deal with handshakes between devices, sample rate differences, clock systems etc. because each device receives and outputs analog signal via mostly the same 1/4" jacks and plugs.
While a digital signal chain would have overall latency benefits and fewer A/D/A conversions, it just doesn’t matter that much with modern hardware.
You already said the right answer. It’s the latency.
Sound is analogue. Both when it’s created and when it’s played back. Transforming it to digital takes time. It makes sense to avoid that transformation in the signal chain for as long as possible before the “interface”, to avoid doing it more than once.
When seeing a band play live, you might be able to appreciate the fact that they’re technically forming one electric analogue circuit…
Also appreciate that vinyl records and tape can be made without ever being digital. I think it’s pretty wild that we can even take a sound, put it on a record and play it back, thereby transferring data without it being digital. The whole process is much more interesting.
Imagine someone hitting a drum so hard that it makes a microphone membrane move, which makes an electric current, that pushes a needle into a record making a dent deep enough that your record player can feel it on the needle and create an electric signal to move your speaker membrane.
It might take some time to do, but when your ears hear that soundwave its basically the same motion that the drummer did originally. It has not been converted to a digital representation of what happened and back. It is the physical “shadow” of what actually happened.
I think it’s kinda cool. I make digital music myself and while it has other cool stuff, I’ll never bad mouth analogue.
Yeah. A signal chain that is entirely analog from instrument to PAs is the gold standard for latency. It’s awesome when it works!
I guess the problem is when it doesn’t, it can be a trouble-shooting nightmare, as noise could potentially creep in at any stage. As a violinist, it’s an ongoing battle for me since signal-to-noise is always poorer than with a guitar, given a small instrument simply can’t put out as much sound energy.
So I’m fussing with pre-amps, active DIs, and the like. Sometimes I think if I could just digitize the signal close to the source, I could get a better result? Probably just wishful thinking though.
A good microphone is probably the best option for violin.
Why not a quarter handspan or a six halver?
???
