Klotz La Grange cable

GavRichList

I bought one of these in December '14 and it's been my favourite cable ever since, so I was more than a little pissed off when it died for no apparent reason and under no stress etc whatsoever this weekend. 

Normally you just just swallow a lead dying, but these are pretty pricey so I was seething. 

Imagine my delight upon doscovering that they carry a manufacturers warrant of 5 years!

It goes back via guitarguitar tomorrow. Pretty good service, that. 

Gagaryn

From the admittedly crappy pictures I can see of these they don't look anything special - the plugs look like Neutrik and the cable looks like van Damme. Nice to get a 5 year warranty though.

GavRichList

Gagaryn said:

From the admittedly crappy pictures I can see of these they don't look anything special - the plugs look like Neutrik and the cable looks like van Damme. Nice to get a 5 year warranty though.

It's their own cable I believe. 

https://shop.klotz-ais.com/shop/5489-premade/5452-guitar-instrument-cable/6227-lapr.html

Won a fair few awards too 

Sporky

Gagaryn said:

From the admittedly crappy pictures I can see of these they don't look anything special

It's excellent cable, and they use good quality Neutrik plugs.

I'd rather that than money wasted on fancy-looking cables that aren't as well made.

CarpeDiem

Sporky said:

Gagaryn said:

From the admittedly crappy pictures I can see of these they don't look anything special

It's excellent cable, and they use good quality Neutrik plugs.

I'd rather that than money wasted on fancy-looking cables that aren't as well made.

I agree with @Sporky Klotz cables and connectors are good quality and I've never had any adverse issues with them.

Gagaryn

Do they do a glittery version? ;-)

GavRichList

Gagaryn said:

Do they do a glittery version? ;-)

I'll put a note in with my return requesting one 

ICBM

A long time ago I had a couple of unexplained mid-cable failures with Klotz cable, and I've never really trusted it since. After that I've always used Horizon for my own cables, with total reliability so far.

Sporky

Gagaryn said:

Do they do a glittery version? ;-)

They do the Europa cable, which is braided. Three colour combinations.

thermionic

I have a Klotz cable I made up myself with Neutrik jacks and in the last couple of years it's gone microphonic. Very loud rustling/rubbing noises whenever I handle the cable. Ironically, the cable is labelled "low microphonics".

Best idea I can come up with is that a bad solder joint at one of the plugs is acting like a diode, or resistance, which in conjunction with the distributed capacitance is somehow acting like a transducer.. or something. I'll reflow the joints either end next time I fire up the old soldering iron.

Sporky

A solder joint can't act as a diode - that would require a semiconducting element.

Could be that the antistatic bit has been damaged (though it's both tough and flexible). Is it anywhere specific on the cable that is making the noise?

viz

Sporky said:

Gagaryn said:

From the admittedly crappy pictures I can see of these they don't look anything special

It's excellent cable, and they use good quality Neutrik plugs.

I'd rather that than money wasted on fancy-looking cables that aren't as well made.

Mine (from 2002 Sporky!) are still going strong after some hefty abuse. 

ICBM

Sporky said:

A solder joint can't act as a diode - that would require a semiconducting element.

Which can happen if it's cracked and a very thin layer of oxide forms.

Sporky said:

Could be that the antistatic bit has been damaged (though it's both tough and flexible).

I would guess the opposite - that the shield braiding has broken somewhere, but is still making a fairly good connection past the break via the conductive plastic so it doesn't go to an open circuit. Even a normal cable will often mostly work like that since the individual braiding strands usually don't break in the same place.

Yes, I am a geek and I have post-mortemed dead cables to find out why .

Sporky

ICBM said:

Sporky said:

A solder joint can't act as a diode - that would require a semiconducting element.

Which can happen if it's cracked and a very thin layer of oxide forms.

You'd have to use some very weird solder for that to become a semiconductor.

Simplest way I can work out is if you had a heavily tin based solder and had used sulphuric acid to clean the joint. Even then it'd need doping with something.

Good point on the shielding - it'd take a fair bit of work to do that much damage, but not implausible. IIRC La Grange is a spiral shield rather than braided, which might make that more likely. I used to like Sommer Spirit for patch leads - that had two spiral shields, wound in opposite directions. Bit of a git to solder the plugs but almost indestructible.

Danny1969

Cables can exhibit some very strange behaviour. There's many a time I've sensed somethings not quite right with something mic'ed up .... the signal needs more gain than normal and it sounds kind of hollow. Then you unscrew the mic lead lead ends ... looks OK, check the mic lead on a multi lead tester and it tests fine. So you swap the cable out and the faults gone, the other lead is duff but not in a way that's detectable with a continuity test ........... to the point I don't test cables with a cable tester anymore except maybe speaker cables
I don't honestly know what goes wrong within the cable to create that fault but it crops up all the time in the PA business

ICBM

Sporky said:

ICBM said:

Sporky said:

A solder joint can't act as a diode - that would require a semiconducting element.

Which can happen if it's cracked and a very thin layer of oxide forms.

You'd have to use some very weird solder for that to become a semiconductor.

Simplest way I can work out is if you had a heavily tin based solder and had used sulphuric acid to clean the joint. Even then it'd need doping with something.

I think it happens more like the junction in a crystal radio detector, rather than a true semiconductor material. Bear in mind that almost all electronics solder *is* almost all tin with minor impurities, and you're halfway there…

I'm pretty sure this is a known mechanism.

(Edit - although as yet, I can't find a reference to it anywhere now!)

thermionic

I will investigate further... from recollection, handling the cable anywhere along its length produces loud noise, which is why I suspected some parasitic component at the jacks rather than a localised fault in the shielding.

Good point @icbm, tin is just below silicon and germanium in the periodic table. I was thinking along the lines of oxide or excess flux.

Sporky

thermionic said:

Good point @icbm, tin is just below silicon and germanium in the periodic table. 

Erm... that's why I suggested tin as the most likely path. Tin sulphide is semi-conducting, hence the sulphuric acid comment.

exocet

ICBM said:

Sporky said:

ICBM said:

Sporky said:

A solder joint can't act as a diode - that would require a semiconducting element.

Which can happen if it's cracked and a very thin layer of oxide forms.

You'd have to use some very weird solder for that to become a semiconductor.

Simplest way I can work out is if you had a heavily tin based solder and had used sulphuric acid to clean the joint. Even then it'd need doping with something.

I think it happens more like the junction in a crystal radio detector, rather than a true semiconductor material. Bear in mind that almost all electronics solder *is* almost all tin with minor impurities, and you're halfway there…

I'm pretty sure this is a known mechanism.

(Edit - although as yet, I can't find a reference to it anywhere now!)

I can remember it being cited as a phenomena  when I used to work in Broadcast Engineering.