Greetings
Jumia consider moving this post to the Cable Forum.
Lots of knowledgeable people on this site to provide you with more input.
Joe Nies
What's better, one conductor or two conductors for an RCA interconnect?
I have a somewhat nice RCA analogue interconnect with one conductor, referred to as a coaxial Cable I guess. But I see higher end RCA cables with two conductors and ground wire. Which is better?
Is better detail provided when connections are made with two conductors?
Twisted pair exposes both wires evenly to electric and magnetic fields causing identical induced noise currents that cancel. It is extremely efficient, as long as the pitch of the twist is much smaller than wavelength of the offending electrical noise. Shield works great at higher frequencies where, in spite of being non-magnetic, shields by means of skin effect (noise currents flow on the outside - shield). Shielded twisted pair is the best combination. |
Learning as we go: after some googling and contemplating there is one area that needs clearing up. The OP was enquiring about various RCA analogue cable designs I believe. I'm sure there can be sound differences between them, single channel coax 75 ohm unbalanced or 110 ohm balanced (3 pin) are among them. One connector, one channel. A coax with RCA connectors is "probably" an s/pdif digital only cable. The single RCA connector has a stereo digital protocol and cannot be used as a single channel analogue cable. As a side note: My Oppo 203, used as a transport, uses one of these single s/pdif to connect a Bifrost 2 DAC. Unfortunately the s/pdif-optical output is not working correctly (verified using an optical cable) A center vocal track is slewed to the right channel, while using an HDMI cable out of the Oppo dac is perfectly centered. Any advice to correct this would be very appreciated as for 2 ch cd output the off centered output is noticeably more resolved with lower background noise. Bummer! |
Kijanki ... You need to go back and review a bit. Twisted pair is good for magnetic and perhaps low frequency EMI. Coax is superior for RFI (with proper RF shield) and is in general better for electrostatic conduction as you have no field differential between the shield and the inner conductor. Even for magnetic coax can be very good. |
@kijanki got it right in one. @deludedaudiophile , you are ignoring in your response that an RCA cable with a twisted pair and shield is in fact a coaxial connection. If the cable is very long this doesn't work so well, but in the shorter connections that are seen in household hookups it works just fine. For longer connections of course balanced is the way to go. |