Cable Tone

When you use a long guitar cable with passive electric guitar pickups, the cable adds capacitance to what is essentially an analog circuit in your guitar. This effectively dulls your tone with the amount of high frequency loss varying based on cable length. Many players love this effect, but others would like to minimize it.

Conversely, any player who uses an active pickup system with a battery-powered “active” preamp has never had this experience. Why? Because active systems are referred to as “buffered” and don’t care about how long your cable is. In fact, they’re designed to allow very long cable runs with little impact on your tone.

AirLock actually recreates the circuit created by the long cables by letting you switch in real capacitors. This means that if you plug in a passive pickup system, you can choose a cable length that suits your taste. If you connect an active pickup system such as our Matrix Infinity onboard preamp system, it simply does not react with the circuit – just like in the real world!

Wireless designers are not getting it! Most wireless brands are using EQ to simulate this high frequency loss. This means users who’ve never experienced it can mistakenly turn this on and their tone suffers. In fact, some systems even have it on all the time!