What makes an audio cable bad?

Soldato
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I ordered a 3m 3.5mm, OFC copper microphone extension cable to plug directly into my usb soundcard. This is to replace my current setup of a 1m usb extension cable (with usb sound card in) and 2x 1m microphone cables. The current setup, while a bit silly, does pretty well. This new cable, though, introduces a ton of noise while using the microphone. I'm just wondering what causes this.
 
Number of factors:

Proper shielding
Material of wire
Manufacturing process
Design tolerances

What you're experiencing is probably as a result of poor shielding of the copper wire - this allows any EM interference to interfere with the analogue signal passing through the cable.

It could be the shielding on the soundcard also.
 
The current setup, while a bit silly, does pretty well.
Why is it silly? Imo better to keep things digital and avoid interference (i.e. they either work or don't) for as long a run as possible. If there's no real reason to replace it, then I wouldn't.
 
Thanks for the responses. Well, I was using the soundcard regardless. The reason I bought the USB sound card in the first place was so that I could just use it for my microphone, as the on board mic port had too much background noise with it. The tiny usb soundcard worked a treat.

As for why it's silly, well, it's just the fact that I'm using 3x 1m cable and somewhere behind my desk is a usb sound card in the middle of a daisy chain. As you say though, if it works, it works.
 
After a point all cables sound pretty much the same, but the really cheap ones can definitely sound bad, for the reasons above.
 
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