shielded vs unshielded pros and cons?

Depends on the design I will take shielded every time.

I'll take shielded and balanced every time as well.  This has 3 conductors.  An outer shield/foil and two signal carrying wires. The shield should only be connected to ground at the source.

There are many audio IC's which are not shielded, and in many situations that will be OK.  Kimber is one brand that comes to mind on unshielded.  That is, most of the time you won't be picking up radio stations from your record player or something truly bad like that.

Shielding does add a tiny bit of capacitance to the cable, as the foil or braid acts like a capacitor to the signal and ground wires.  Perhaps this is why some claim to hear a dulling of the sound.  Or perhaps they get less euphonic noise?

Ask Mike Morrow or Ray Kimber (Russ Andrews)
I run unshielded unbalanced ICs on my phono as low as a.26 mV MC. Quieter than LP surface noise.
They sound  better than the shielded AQs they replaced.

Who knows where noise can intrude in a system.  I recently talked with a repair person for a local shop who had to run down RFI problems in a system.  It turns out that the long speaker cables were acting as an antenna and injected noise into the system; who knew that speaker cables would benefit from shielding?

In my builds it is clear that shielding a cable using conventional methods like foils and braided copper tubing closed in and darkened the sound. Unshielded ICs sounded more open, detailed and nuanced in my experience. Now some designs bypass these negative effects by shielding in a different manner and with SOTA materials. (Look up Hapa Audio for example)


Not one easy answer to the OP’s question.

If using the common twisted pair type of IC design, then using all natural conductor coverings like silk and cotton with no shield will sound best in most audio systems. Phono cables must be shielded however.


So many different designs out there that one cannot say shielding is always this or that.  Too many variables.