• No more than a standard connection. Every cable inherently acts as an antenna, so that’s why we try to avoid running them parallel to power lines and other things that would give off audible interference. If you actually want to reject interference, you’d need a balanced signal. Regular RCA and 1/4” are both unbalanced, so they’ll both pick up interference regardless of how they’re tied together.

    When dealing with unbalanced cable, the most important part is making sure your signal to noise ratio is good. If you can get a hot enough signal that your gain can be lowered, you may be able to reduce the interference completely below your noise floor. Of course there are arguments against this (like how running things that hot could potentially mean you’re clipping your outputs, which introduces a whole host of other issues) but as a general rule, you want your gain to be as low as possible, so you can reduce the amount of background interference and noise you’re picking up.

    • @mcmoor
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      17 months ago

      I’m still very surprised that the most rudimentary of antenna can transmit and pick up signals acceptably. Like everything else in reality, I imagined that it’d have TONS of noise but somehow it’s all still audible.