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.
I cant imagin how many 3.5 cables I'd have ruined onstage....they are simplynot stromg enough.
It would get pulled out or the skinny little cord would break almost immediately
The 1/4" jacks became standard before metric ruled the world. Besides, 1/4" jacks are way sturdier than 3.5mm posts. Now if the metric guys came up with a 7.0mm jack - we can talk transition.
I wonder if a 6.5mm would be within tolerance to be compatible with 1/4" plugs.
I believe it is, it's not entirely uncommon to see both described. I'm in the U.S. and been working with audio my whole life, 1/4" is for sure the named standard but 6.5mm is often referenced due to the headphone size of 3.5mm often being called that size instead of the 1/8". Especially if you're looking to buy online,
Why headphones are referred to by 3.5mm and the rest (basically) is 1/4" is a silly thing but hey, I don't make the colloquialisms.
The only thing you'd want to watch out for is whether your cable is mono or stereo, which is independent from the barrel size, but does need the barrel to have 2 rings (TRRS vs. TRS), to complete the Tip Ring Sleeve connection.
But yeah, if you need 1/4" and can only find 6.5mm you'll be fine
I kind of doubt it - the 1/4" tolerances are pretty tight.
why aren't phones and shit made with 1/4" jacks instead of 3.5mm jacks?
Ftfy: why aren't phones made with jacks?
honestly, i had completely forgotten that some phones, for some completely unfathomable reason, lack an audio jack of any kind. if you are suffering through that, you have my condolences.
If the only tool you have is a jack, every problem looks like a pallet.
Phones ≠ pallets
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.
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 rj45 or coax?
Permanently Deleted
So this comes down to the fundamental question of why is everything in music still so analog in this digital age? I was genuinely surprised when I first joined a band and found how archaic everything seemed to be. Even the terminology sounded vaguely steam punk. Condenser? You mean a capacitor?
I think historically, the problem was that anything that adds latency to your signal is bad news when you are performing. As a musician, any human-perceptible level of delay can throw you off your game, but there is also the possibility of unwanted sound artifacts coming out of things being slightly out of phase.
That said, I think things have come along far enough now that digital cabling could work on stage? They would have some advantages in that electrical noise would presumably be less of an issue with error-correcting protocols once the signal is in digital form? USB could be bad at the sampling point though if there is electrical noise in its power supply.
But I am not a sound engineer. I'm curious what others think about this? As a violin/fiddle guy, those 1/4" cables really weigh down the instrument and I think about this stuff from time to time.
Why not a quarter handspan or a six halver?
???
