Good RCA's and Bad RCA's?

[Jordan Guess]

I don't even know EXACTLY what RCA cables do cause I am a noob, but obviously we have to have them (for transmitting sound or whatever?) but are there certain RCA's that offer better efficiency (for whatever there purpose is) or will any brand work?

[Crandis16]

Some are one way RCA's, those are generally pretty good. You will notice a difference in cheap RCAs (radioshack) and quality RCAs (monster cable). I upgraded RCAs to my sub and saw a difference, but you will see more difference if you upgrade RCAs to your mids/highs amp

Edit: As for brands, I don't know. I was about to buy stinger 5000 series because it got some great reviews from some SMD members in a thread

[Jordan Guess]

Thanks man, thats exactly what I needed to know, do you mind explaining what an RCA does for me though, just so I can save the embarrassment for the future?

[Skullz]

Sorry but your choice in rca's didn't help with how well your sound became unless the ones you had were bad to begin with, cause i use radio shack rca's ran right next to my 1/0 power wire ran right down the middle of the car with no adverse effects or lack of quality.

As long as you get shielded cables you'll be fine regardless of what people will tell you, the only difference you'll ever hear is the higher end ones and even then you need the high end gear to match them and most of the improvement is in the upper range.

[bassface]

Ive heard lots of people say it makes no difference between expensive and cheap rcs's, as long as they arent ran near amp power lines. But realistically rca's arent expensive enough to keep me from buying decent ones.

[Crandis16]

Well it gives your amp the left and right audio signal from the head unit. The better the material, the better the signal. If you get a DD-1 then you can set the gains on the amp where the RCA's start to distort, but I believe that the distortion depends more on your head unit than the RCA's. Many other people can get way more in depth than I can and give you very scientific explanations. If you post a thread asking for recommendations of RCA's to use then I'm sure they could point you in the right direction with all the experience the forum has lol.

[Crandis16]

Sorry but your choice in rca's didn't help with how well your sound became unless the ones you had were bad to begin with, cause i use radio shack rca's ran right next to my 1/0 power wire ran right down the middle of the car with no adverse effects or lack of quality.

As long as you get shielded cables you'll be fine regardless of what people will tell you, the only difference you'll ever hear is the higher end ones and even then you need the high end gear to match them and most of the improvement is in the upper range.

You might be right, when I upgraded RCA's I also ran them a different route. before they were next to the power cable and it didn't sound bad to me, but when I switched the routing I noticed a difference

[1996BLKBauer]

Your and device with an output, puts out a very small amount of power to transmit the music from device to the head unit, in this case the head unit to the Amplifier to the back. This is called a low level output on the head unit. where if you tried to hook up a speaker to it, it may not play, or may be very quiet. This is because you can have the music playing from a device to the head unit, and then to the amplifier which then steps up the power to where you can hear it. All the RCA's really do is transmits the music at a low level, through a relative small sized cable. Shielded cables are the way to go, because big power hungry stuff like amp use massive amount of power, which can mess up the signal that the RCA cable is trying to transmit, so you have interference. I hope this did not confuse you more, but I tried to explain it the way I was taught.

Also good names... Rockford Fosgate, JL Audio, Orion, Higher up Street Wires brand, there are others, but there is just a few to look out for.