RCA vs Phono cable


I have a 30+ year old Pioneer PL-560 turntable in perfect working condition (Shure M97XE cartridge/stylus) My Primare preamp has no TT connections so I just bought the Graham Slee Gram Amp2 SE phono stage with a PSU1 (should arrive Thursday). I will need a pair of interconnects to connect the phono stage to the preamp so I bought a used pair of Synergistic Research Level 1 UEF Atmosphere (RCA) 5ft/1.5m Interconnect cables. Then I saw info on "phono cables." Is there a difference? If yes, what? Should I have bought a phono cable instead of an RCA or a shorter RCA ?
mewsickbuff

Showing 2 responses by atmasphere

How does low capacitance effect sound quality?
OK- this is a bit technical, but the cartridge employs a coil and so has a property of coils called 'inductance'. Interconnect cables have 'capacitance'; when the two are in parallel as in this case, they form a resonant circuit. You really don't want the resonance in the audio band (it can make things unpleasantly bright and contributes to ticks and pops)!

So a low capacitance cable will help to keep the resonance at a frequency outside of the audio band (and the higher the better). The thing is, it really should not be ignored and a lot depends on your phono preamp as to how it is able to manage with the ultrasonic noise that will be present because of this resonance. There are techniques for loading the cartridge at the phono input that can reduce the resonance.

This is a bit trickier with high output MM cartridges like yours (the correct loading will be a resistor/capacitor combination) but even if you don't load the cartridge, the low capacitance cable is important!
Usually a phono cable has low capacitance per foot as opposed to other audio cables...