I read/feared tales of ideal length for tonearm cables - something to do with capacitance
@lohanimal A good tonearm cable will be low capacitance. But I would not be concerned about shortening one, because when you reduce the capacitance (which will happen when the cable is shorter) you reduce the problem which the capacitance causes.
If you want to know more, in a nutshell the capacitance of the cable interacts with the inductance of the cartridge to cause a high frequency resonance. If you have a moving magnet high output cartridge, this resonance can be just inside the audio band (causing brightness) or just above it (causing phase shift, which the ear interprets as brightness, so essentially the same thing). By reducing the capacitance of the cable, that resonance is shifted to a higher frequency and so becomes less audible.
If the cartridge is a low output moving coil, then the resonance is so high as to be considered radio frequencies- and so shortening the cable will have no audible effect.
Either way you're better off, so if you can solder well, have at it!