What makes a Digital Interconnect


How is 75 ohm measured and what makes a cable specifically digital?

I have a coax RCA cable with the following specs, which is sold as an analog:

Geometry: coax
Bandwidth: > DC - 1 GHz
Rs: center pin 0.06 Ω
ground 0.19 Ω
Cp: 56 pF (pin / shell)
Ls: center pin 1.6 μH
ground 1.6 μH
Bend Radius: 3” (75mm)
Cable Diameter: 3/16” (4.8mm)
Shielding: low magnitude 100% RF shielding, tied to shell at both end
Tolerance: 0.5%

Why a measurement of bandwidth?
kphinney
The 75 ohms refers to what is called "characteristic impedance", which has relevance only to frequencies that are much higher than analog audio signals (such as frequency components that are present in digital signals, video signals, and radio signals). It cannot be measured without special purpose test equipment that can deal with those high frequencies.

To a close approximation it is equal to (the square root of (inductance per unit length divided by capacitance per unit length)).

In the specs you've listed, Cp represents capacitance, the p denoting that it appears as a parallel capacitance between the center pin and ground. Ls denotes the inductance, the s indicating that it appears in series, along the length of the wire.

I have no idea why the series inductance for the ground shield appears to be specified as equal to the series inductance for the center conductor. I would expect the inductance across the shield connection to be far less.

Also, 56pf and either 1.6uH or 3.2uH (which would be the total round-trip series inductance if the center conductor and the ground conductor/shield were each 1.6uH) do not come close to equalling a 75 ohm characteristic impedance. 56pf and 1.6uH compute to a characteristic impedance of 169 ohms, while 56pf and 3.2uH compute to 239 ohms.

Re your question about bandwidth, 1GHz is a vastly higher frequency than a cable terminated with rca connectors would ever be used for, and probably just represents the frequency range over which the cable itself (apart from the connectors) can supposedly be used, without unreasonable signal loss. Although the spec is meaningless without cable length and attenuation for that frequency also being specified.

Regards,
-- Al
Al,
Something tells me you have more than a passing fancy with audio gear, lol.

What engineering school did you attend :)

Howard
What engineering school did you attend?
Columbia (BSEE); RPI (MSEE). However, my engineering career (now retired) was in defense electronics, not audio.

Best regards,
-- Al