my book on building pro guitar rigs is out!

[little-b]

lol!..Thats about it for moving this thing..The 20 spc. often stays in a studio for clients to plug into..The poweramps are now moved to a 12 space thats full w/ 3. The 2150,classic,and mesa 500..That leaves the 20 space some room for a CAE3+,and anything new. As for the cables,what you said abouts right;I may be the only one to notice the difference...I wish I knew more about how the 2 compare,but that would probably be better for a whole new thread.

 

[little-b]

Is there a difference in sound quality and/or reliability between the George L and Lava cables?

Man..I wish I knew if there was..Lava has a trillion different lines of cables,George L-only a few lines,but some local cat is tellin us gearheads that theyre better than GeorgeL for pure tone....but I dont really know yet.

 

[scottkahn]

There are guys in forums who will tell you that one brand of cable sounds better/is superior to the other. This is the stuff of folklore and legend.

If two "custom" cables used the same mogami wire and neutrik ends, they might sound the same. But all these manufacturers use different wire in their cables. Thus, they will all sound ever so slightly different, and sometimes significantly so, as different wires will attenuate signals differently, and shielding difference may impact tone, etc... funny thing is that most amps have these little knob thingies for adjusting bass, treble, presence, depth, whatever ;-). At the same settings, two cables may sound different. Tweak your EQ to compensate and you're back to the same sound.

I'm generalizing a bit, but really all of the premium cables sound great. Personally, I have used George L's and Planet Waves the most, and I prefer the Planet Waves in my rack -- I love their physical connectors and the way they get wired. But I love Georg L's on pedalboards for their compactness. I never traded one for the other because of tone. I plan to review the Lava cables at some point this year, too. I expect they'll sound equally great, though I might have to tweak an EQ setting here or there.

Scott

 

[little-b]

thanks for the info Scott..If you do an apples to apples lava cable to (insert other brand here) review, ie: same cord length, etc..let me know, pm me or post it.Id love to know what you came up with.When I do shootouts of pedals, etc..I run everything thru these two 1966 blackface princeton reverbs.Carl Verheyen also said thats his favorite way of testing pedals, and ect...mainly because the princetons add no color and signature amp enhancements of any kind..Its a purely neutural testing ground amp.We use our 2 princetons for this kind of stuff all the time and it really works.

 

[scottkahn]

Hey Littleb,

I'll tell you... at MusicPlayers.com we take product testing extremely seriously. In fact we're the only MI publication that takes a labs-based approach to testing music gear -- something I learned back when I was a senior technology analyst at Ziff-Davis/PC Week Magazine years ago. But let me tell you about the one nightmare test scenario: testing cables!!!

We were going to do a cable shootout test of our own a few years ago, and started the process. Here's the thing:

With name-brand cables, all of them in short lengths, like jumper cables, wiring in a rack, etc. will sound great. Where you'll hear the differences is primarily in instrument cable lengths. And the longer your cable, the more susceptible it would be to interference and signal attenuation, so for highlighting differences, it's easier with longer cables. That said, some companies make them 15', some 20', some 25', some 22'... we couldn't truly compare apples to apples, and ultimately abandoned the testing.

Now if I wired up a 12 inch cable, one of Planet Waves, one Lava, one George L's (silver jack plugs or the gold ones? and which wire type as they have two?)... what would we hear? I don't think we'd hear much of a difference, and would have to record a wide range of samples of clean and overdriven tones to compare. And then, none would be better or worse than the other... they'd just MAYBE sound very slightly different eq-wise, which wouldn't matter as you could just tweak your amp settings to taste as you do in the real world.

If we compared to really cheap cables, those would (historically, for sure) sound appreciably noisy by comparison to any of the premium cables, but really, we can't see a compelling difference that makes one cable sound better or worse than the other. Truly, the best cable is the one that colors your sound the least. Cable should not change your tone -- that's for your amp and effects to do. But when a cable brings out higher frequencies better and that new guitar cable suddenly makes your rig seem to sound better... I see that as a fundamental problem. I don't want the randomness of different cables changing my tone, just like I don't care for open-back cabinets since the tone changes based on the size of the room, proximity to a wall, the material on that wall, etc...

I've read some cable roundup reviews and find them interesting, but ultimately not objective enough for us to do a formal comparative review. If someone comes up with a good test, though... I'd be interested in checking that out.

 

[little-b]

+1...thats usually what happens..