The size of the internal wire, solder connection, strain relief, and especially the cable shield size are all factors.
The shield is most critical if you look at the length of wire an miniscule power of any instrument without a powered preamp. Even with a built in preamp the output impedance will be high from most circuits.
Think of it this way, high impedance is another way of saying there is a voltage signal but not much current is able to flow to or from the device. If you try to pull or push too much current the signal will disappear. When there is not much current flowing, the signal is much more susceptible to other signals and noise crossing the wire.
Most 3.5mm audio connectors have poor shielding, strain relief, and the actual connection points where the wires are soldered are terrible. With the way they are constructed, the solder connection must be done very quickly to avoid damaging the thin plastic insulation between the rings that make up the tip terminal. With the larger quarter inch connector, there is a lot more heat mass in the actual terminals and there is enough room to make solder terminals with heat isolation. This helps to match the terminal with a larger wire gage so that both surfaces can evenly wet with solder with a properly set iron temperature. In theory this leads to a far more robust connection.
Most 3.5mm cables are unshielded. This is fine for the low impedance (high current flow) of an amplifier output stage, but it is totally insufficient for the high impedance input of an instrument.
This is why instrument cables generally cost so much more too. You’re buying more copper, an engineered cable that has more that just wires in an extruded plastic sleeve, and the connectors are special purpose, beefier, and more engineered for a specialty task.
Thanks that was a very clear explanation, i appreciate you ❤
Add to all that, back to the dawn of electric guitar, 1/4 inch connectors were simply much more common and readily available.
It became the defacto standard because its what was always used.
While jumping and running on scene you want something sturdy not a whimpy 3.5mm jack.
Some folks don’t work shows and it shows 😜
gig boys
Because 3.5mm jacks suck. 6.3mm jacks are much more sturdy and can be easily mounted on 6mm or even thicker cable, which can also handle much more use.
Flimsy jack and thin cheap cable cable is asking for trouble during performance.
The only plus of 3.5mm and smaller ‘phone jacks’ is their size and in many applications it is much less important than reliability.
Don’t adapters exist?
They do and make reliability even worse.
why aren’t phones and shit made with 1/4" jacks instead of 3.5mm jacks?
Because good luck finding a phone nowadays that’s at a bit thicker than 1/4". (It’s a shame really; I kinda miss those older, thicker phones…)
Would be better with XLR, but anyway, the jack is the standard that was used in the very first electric guitars.
I’m not sure why they chose that one at the time, but it was the same kind of connection used in telephone boards, so it was already a standard for audio long before the invention of electric guitars. The jack was invited in 1877. Makes sense to use something that already existed and had proven to be reliable and available.
The reason they’re still used is for backward compatibility. Other cabled instruments and microphones have changed standards through the years, but because guitars need to be paired with all kinds of amplifiers and stomp boxes from various manufacturers from different decades, it’s impossible for one brand to change the standard.
A curious fact is that the 1/4 jack is the longest running connection standard.
With many professionals using wireless cables these days, it could more easily be changed, but at the same time, since going without a cable also removes many of the issues with the jack, there’s really no need to change it.
why xlr?
It locks, is more durable and balanced.
balanced?
It reduces noise from interference.
An unbalanced cable has two wires. A ground and the signal. The audio is the difference between the two. A guitar cable is unbalanced.
A balanced cable has 3 wires. A ground, a signal (+ hot) and a signal with opposite polarity (- cold). The receiver will flip the polarity of the cold signal and add the two signals. The result is that any interference that happens in the cable is also flipped on the cold signal and thereby cancels the interference on the hot signal.
Put in like math: let’s say your audio is 3x and noise is 0.5y An unbalanced cable would deliver 3x + 0.5y =noise being added to the output.
A balanced cable would deliver “hot” 3x + 0.5y and “cold” -3x +0.5y. The receiver flips the cold resulting in 3x+0.5y +3x -0.5y =6x + 0y. This can then be divided by 2 resulting in the correct 3x and no noise.
the guitar input is unbalanced?
Yeah, a guitar output is a mono unbalanced two wire 1/4" TS jack.
Of course there are people who make guitars with custom wiring, but the standard is TS. 2 wires: tip and sleeve.
You can use a stereo/balanced TRS jack with 3 wires,? (Tip, Ring Sleeve) but only because those are sort of compatible with TS. It won’t actually be balanced.
so whyd you start off with saying it’s balanced if it’s unvalanced andbwhy dont guitars come balacned
I wonder if it would be possible to use some jacks and a couple of cables to run Ethernet.
I guess so. The phoneline in my house only has two wires (middle pair of a rj11) so it could work just as well on a guitar cable. It runs at 20/2 mb, which is about maximum for this sort of line. Works alright for TV streaming and office work, but it’s too slow for keeping up with the daily gigabytes of game updates.
Cuz quarter inch jackets are for mice
(and dainty jacks fall out. You can get an adapter if you really want it)
I think it’s purely durability. Larger cords are harder to snap.
Why not a quarter handspan or a six halver?
???
