How essential is shielding?


Both my analog interconnects and my speaker cables are unshielded, yet my system is pretty much dead quiet. This is making me wonder whether the importance of shielding is sometimes exaggerated.

The majority of cable manufacturers seem to emphasize shielding as an essential feature of design. I don't doubt that there are many situations where shielding is both necessary and effective. But my results with unshielded cables makes me suspect that there are also situations where shielding is unnecessary or even detrimental, and that these situations may be more common than would be suggested by the dominance of shielded designs.

How essential do you think shielding is?

Thanks for any input,
Bryon
bryoncunningham
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Hi Bryon,

My opinion is that the case for shielding is strongest when it comes to unbalanced interconnects, both line level and phono level.

In the case of unbalanced line level interconnects, signal return currents flow in common with extraneous inter-chassis noise currents which will be present to some degree due to ground-loop effects, as explained in this paper. Since the receiving component cannot distinguish between signal and noise that may be present at its input, the voltages corresponding to those extraneous currents in the return conductor must be minimized. That means minimizing the impedance of that connection path, which in turn will be accomplished by a quality shield, but not necessarily by unshielded configurations. And certainly not by a cable configuration in which the return conductor is a simple piece of wire, which will have substantial impedance at high frequencies due to its inductance, and perhaps also higher impedance at low frequencies due to higher resistance.

As explained in the reference, an important factor in all of that is stray capacitance in the power transformer of each component. Which means that the magnitude of this effect will be system-dependent and unpredictable.

Shielding will also, as others have said, reduce noise pickup caused by rfi/emi effects, which is particularly important in the case of unbalanced interfaces due to their poor common mode noise rejection capability, and in the case of phono level interconnects due to the low signal levels that are involved.

That said, it's always been a mystery to me how, in particular, Anti-Cables unbalanced interconnects, which use a coiled piece of wire as the return conductor, apparently perform very well for many users.

All of the foregoing considerations are pretty much inapplicable to balanced interfaces, as you will realize, and so I would expect shielding to be less important for balanced interconnects.

And I would expect it to be unimportant for speaker cables, with the inter-chassis noise current consideration being inapplicable to a passive speaker, and because sensitivity to emi/rfi effects is lessened by the low impedances and relatively high signal levels that are involved. Although I do recall one thread from some time ago in which an rfi problem was resolved by changing the speaker cables.

Best regards, and happy new year!

-- Al
I just replaced a shielded PC with a non-shielded one on my preamp and the difference was dramatically positive. I'll be trying non-shielded on the mono blocks next and hoping to hear more improvement.

Cardas has a youtube discussion on this topic stating otherwise:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uhobsHs-_o

My theory is that if you stay below a certain price point (lets just say $500) then you just have to experiment with both typologies and pick your poison. As you get over say $1000 and up you start getting the best of both worlds. Of course there's plenty of snake oil that needs to be avoided but there are some real science behind a few of the higher end cables.

A comment on the Cardas video linked to above. I don't disagree with anything that was said, but I would point out that the main reason for the dramatic changes in the waveform displayed on the oscilloscope as the cable was moved about is that the other end of the cable was not connected to anything. If it had been connected to the output of a component, the output impedance of the component, being vastly lower than the only impedance that was present in the setup (the input impedance of the scope), would have made it a completely different story.

Regards,
-- Al
Almarg states the reality of cable choice. Location is paramount. I do use the Speltz ICs because they keep up with all the improvements I otherwise make to my system.