The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I thought coaxial cable was the kind that cable tv uses...
it should look different from an RCA.
-bill

"Coaxial" refers to the cable, not the connectors on either end.

Sober: I think your question's basically the same as Leaf's original. Try using a regular RCA cable. Worst case, it just does nothing.

Most RCA cables are coaxial. Really cheap ones might not be, but they'd suck for analog even more than they'd suck for digital.

Electronics companies LOVE to shoot themselves in the foot by not labeling things as the consumer will expect to see them. If you have an RCA jack, label it RCA not f-in' "Coaxial". I mean, come on. Must we all be experts to use your damned product? Help us out a little.

When I rule the world, these things will change.

Yeah, they should at the very least be consistent about naming things after the type of connector, which is of course what "RCA" refers to. If they have very specific standards for the kind of cable, then they could say e.g. "RCA coaxial," and then in the product manual have a really long-winded thing about "you must use a coaxial-type cable with RCA connectors rated to carry at least 500mA of power at 12VDC at frequencies of at least 200KHz with less than 1% THD" or whatever the actual S/PDIF cable spec is.

Is there an official name for the coax connectors used on TV antenna cables, anyway?

fluffy wrote:Is there an official name for the coax connectors used on TV antenna cables, anyway?

F connector

Okay, and is there a name for them that non-EEs will recognize which isn't just "coax?"

fluffy wrote:Is there an official name for the coax connectors used on TV antenna cables, anyway?

I believe that the connector is of the BNC family. Coaxial is the cable type as Deshead said. The deal with coaxial is it has a hot wire and the shield.
Wait here's a link.....
http://www.amphenolrf.com/products/bnc.asp

Pablo

BNC connectors are different... the cable connectors are screw-type, while BNC are the ones with the little locking tab that you twist on and off. They're what's used in old Ethernet (10base-2) and high-end studio video interconnects and so on.

(And yes, I'm aware that 'coax' refers to the cable, not the connector, but I was using it as the common name for the F-connector used to connect coaxial cable to televisions.)

Just because nobody else has mentioned it yet, do be aware that when you're transferring digital signals over S/PDIF cables, you will, at some point run into copy protection issues. This won't affect recording your bass into the machine, but it may come into play later on.

The "S/P" in S/PDIF stands for Sony/Philips, and the S/PDIF connection standard was developed specifically to include copy protection bits. For example, on my old Philips CD recorder, if I record a CD from an analog source, I can make a digital copy of that CD, but I can't make digital copies of that COPY (on the Philips or other "consumer" deck). I can make a digital copy of a new CD I bought at the store, but I can't make digital copies of that copy. This is the dreaded "Serial Copy Management System," aka SCMS.

When you extract CD audio onto a computer, the copy protection bits are not part of the .wav file format, so you _can_ use your computer to copy from copies. Even on a DAT or CD unit with SCMS, you can make unlimited copies from the original source (the CD you bought at the store). You just can't make digital copies of copies. The illogic of this has been discussed to death elsewhere and does not need to be rehashed here.

Also, I have heard from reputable sources that the S/PDIF inputs on Soundblaster soundcards (even the upper-end ones like my Audigy) resample digital audio on input. So even if you're feeding in 44.1 khz audio and recording on the computer at 44.1 khz, the soundcard will convert the digital to analog and then back to digital with some loss of signal quality...

TSI, my guess is that the S/PDIF output on your amp is going to be the digital equivalent of the analog "line out" on your amp, and the sound you get by recording the S/PDIF signal will be as "direct sounding" as the line out of the amp. Maybe slightly cleaner, since you won't get losses due to cabling and RF interference between the amp and the recorder.

Of course, as someone who grew up quite happy with a no-NR cassette copy of an LP played on a cheap stereo, I think the whole issue of needing to make direct digital copies is somewhat overrated. I can go out the "analog" outputs of a DAT deck into the analog ins on my CD recorder and the sound isn't going to degrade audibly. I read a survey somewhere where a bunch of recording engineers compared digital originals with 20th generation analog CD copies and among those who could tell a difference, about half actually preferred the sound of the copy.

The alternative to the S/PDIF interface is the AES/BUI interface, which uses XLR cables. The AES/BUI (aka the "pro" interface) spec does not include copy protection bits, so there's no SCMS to worry about.

Hope all that was of interest to somebody...

Charles

fluffy wrote:BNC connectors are different...

Fluffy I wrote of the BNC family.......
Check the link I gave you. Just cuz they lock doesn't mean they aren't of the same species
http://www.amphenolrf.com/products/typef.asp
This is an extension of the link I posted....... It was in Type F connector on that same page...... Maybe this time read it....

I did read it. It only showed the nub-lock types. That Type F page says nothing about BNC, and so there is nothing to indicate that they aren't separate product lines.

Just because two things are on the same site doesn't mean they're extensions of each other.

Direct-in guitar using SPDIF

I was recording a little too hot, which is obvious in the recording, but I think that's a damn fine sound. This unit I'm using has some pretty good speaker simulators. This was recorded with some pretty heavy lead distortion, and the speaker simulation was presumably a Marshall 4x12.

Pretty fuckin leet if you ask me.

And I just posted a better sample in a full mix setting over at somesongs. I'm happy with it. No more mics for me.