Measuring Digital Cables - JPS Labs Superconductor (orig)

House de Kris

Loud-n-Deep
Again, AK member DKak had a digital audio cable for test. This time a cable made by JPS Labs called the Superconductor. This is a 1m cable terminated with gold BNC connectors on both ends. I have no idea about the cost of this cable. The Superconductor is such a pretty cable I had to include a picture of it. This is a very rigid cable with corregated ridges under the jacket. This is called armor and is intended to pretect the cable from abuse. Typically, I've only seen this construction on cables used in a lab. You don't want to have to throw out an expensive cable just because your scope cart rolled over it. At any rate, a directional arrow was affixed to this cable, and I respected it for these measurements.

The TDR reports that this cable is 74.72ohms. TDT measurements of propagation time are typical of air (foam) dielectrics, and the risetime is superfast. The network analyzer has a 3dB bandwidth of over 2.8GHz. As in other network analyzer pictures from me in these cable measurements, please ignore the phase plot, the general shape is correct, but the tilt is completely uncalibrated.

The only potential complaint about this cable is that it looks like the connetors are 50ohm BNCs and not 75ohm. The evidence I base this statement on is in the photo of the cable. The teflon ring inside the shield contact is typical of 50ohm connectors. Since all of my measuring equipment is designed for the 50ohm world, its impossible to see the actual connector impedance in this case.
 

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