The size of the internal wire, solder connection, strain relief, and especially the cable shield size are all factors.
The shield is most critical if you look at the length of wire an miniscule power of any instrument without a powered preamp. Even with a built in preamp the output impedance will be high from most circuits.
Think of it this way, high impedance is another way of saying there is a voltage signal but not much current is able to flow to or from the device. If you try to pull or push too much current the signal will disappear. When there is not much current flowing, the signal is much more susceptible to other signals and noise crossing the wire.
Most 3.5mm audio connectors have poor shielding, strain relief, and the actual connection points where the wires are soldered are terrible. With the way they are constructed, the solder connection must be done very quickly to avoid damaging the thin plastic insulation between the rings that make up the tip terminal. With the larger quarter inch connector, there is a lot more heat mass in the actual terminals and there is enough room to make solder terminals with heat isolation. This helps to match the terminal with a larger wire gage so that both surfaces can evenly wet with solder with a properly set iron temperature. In theory this leads to a far more robust connection.
Most 3.5mm cables are unshielded. This is fine for the low impedance (high current flow) of an amplifier output stage, but it is totally insufficient for the high impedance input of an instrument.
This is why instrument cables generally cost so much more too. You're buying more copper, an engineered cable that has more that just wires in an extruded plastic sleeve, and the connectors are special purpose, beefier, and more engineered for a specialty task.
Thanks that was a very clear explanation, i appreciate you ❤
Add to all that, back to the dawn of electric guitar, 1/4 inch connectors were simply much more common and readily available.
It became the defacto standard because its what was always used.
While jumping and running on scene you want something sturdy not a whimpy 3.5mm jack.
Some folks don’t work shows and it shows 😜
gig boys
Because 3.5mm jacks suck. 6.3mm jacks are much more sturdy and can be easily mounted on 6mm or even thicker cable, which can also handle much more use.
Flimsy jack and thin cheap cable cable is asking for trouble during performance.
The only plus of 3.5mm and smaller 'phone jacks' is their size and in many applications it is much less important than reliability.
Don't adapters exist?
They do and make reliability even worse.
I cant imagin how many 3.5 cables I'd have ruined onstage....they are simplynot stromg enough.
It would get pulled out or the skinny little cord would break almost immediately
The 1/4" jacks became standard before metric ruled the world. Besides, 1/4" jacks are way sturdier than 3.5mm posts. Now if the metric guys came up with a 7.0mm jack - we can talk transition.
I wonder if a 6.5mm would be within tolerance to be compatible with 1/4" plugs.
I believe it is, it's not entirely uncommon to see both described. I'm in the U.S. and been working with audio my whole life, 1/4" is for sure the named standard but 6.5mm is often referenced due to the headphone size of 3.5mm often being called that size instead of the 1/8". Especially if you're looking to buy online,
Why headphones are referred to by 3.5mm and the rest (basically) is 1/4" is a silly thing but hey, I don't make the colloquialisms.
The only thing you'd want to watch out for is whether your cable is mono or stereo, which is independent from the barrel size, but does need the barrel to have 2 rings (TRRS vs. TRS), to complete the Tip Ring Sleeve connection.
But yeah, if you need 1/4" and can only find 6.5mm you'll be fine
any idea why jbs headphones do a 2.5 male and 3.5 male wire thing? also ik this is offtopic but im looking for headphones that i can use with my audio interface (ive an adapter if needed) and are wireless (so both wired and wireless in one). thoughts? (professional musician btw)
IIRC theirs are set to 2.5mm at the headphone with 3.5mm as for the device connector. This is pretty common for companies that want to make some form of proprietary connection.
Usually these decisions are media because proprietary connections make them more money selling three or four components of 0.02c cables turned into $5-$25 sales per cable. From a consumer perspective, the only upside to it is that having a replaceable cable can increase longevity, and I suppose from a company perspective in order to ensure 100% compatibility, best to sell your version. That way any 3rd party cables can be the problem.
I think 2.5mm used to be used more commonly on old dumb phones for those headsets and stuff like that. I still see them sometimes but these days it's mostly present on dual plugs like walkies, which is pretty much for mic and audio with a locking mechanism to keep it in place.
Currently I don't have any suggestions for wired/wireless headphones, I wish I did. At the moment my set is the Beyerdynamics DT 990 Pro, I was looking into a version with detachable cables but none that I came across also had wireless - though they're surely out there. It would be nice to have a set to swap between Bluetooth and plugged in.
Currently I don't have any suggestions for wired/wireless headphones, I wish I did. At the moment my set is the Beyerdynamics DT 990 Pro, I was looking into a version with detachable cables but none that I came across also had wireless - though they're surely out there. It would be nice to have a set to swap between Bluetooth and plugged in.
if you find some online please tell me what model, you know muxh more so id greatlt appreciatw it
I kind of doubt it - the 1/4" tolerances are pretty tight.
why aren't phones and shit made with 1/4" jacks instead of 3.5mm jacks?
Ftfy: why aren't phones made with jacks?
If the only tool you have is a jack, every problem looks like a pallet.
Phones ≠ pallets
honestly, i had completely forgotten that some phones, for some completely unfathomable reason, lack an audio jack of any kind. if you are suffering through that, you have my condolences.
they are if you look outside apple
Most android phones don't have these... The only brands I have seen that still make phones with headphone jacks are Asus and Sony...
My wife's new Samsung has a headphone jack and I refuse to buy a new phone without one.
I looked at the list... It seems that almost all of them are mid/low budget phones, while high end phones rarely come with a jack. As much as it pains me to say it, it makes sense, since people who buy expensive phones probably can afford a wireless set while people who buy budget phones are less likely to buy wireless headphones.
And you'd wrong again, because all mayor manufacturers offer affordable wireless headphones as well. You can get a decent pair for as low as $20 and great wireless headphones with active noise cancelling for $50.
I got a question thought.
I'm using heaphones made for the best audio quality, i use a quarter jack to my audio card or, for my phone, just add an adapter to 3.5.
But my phone is getting old, is it possible to keep a good audio quality, and the heaphones wich sound i like, but through bluetooth?
Because i've never experienced any good bluetooth converter, and neither did i found any good bluetooth headphones, and let's be honest i kinda don't want to buy a new expensive one after getting mine wich was already pretty expensive...
You want a bluetooth DAC. FiiO makes some decent ones. Only downside might be audio latency, but the quality should be there for budget audiophile headphones like the HD6XX
Audio latency isn't a priority for me, and since you mentioned it i've looked into the codec available (both on the phone i want and the dac) and it seems like FiiO is a very good option.
Thank you very much for the recommendation.
That won't give good quality because the phone sending the signal to the DAC is sending a poor quality signal. Sending a poor quality signal to a high quality DAC won't give you good audio.
However, all OP needs is just going to be a usb-c to 3.5mm audio jack to plug his headphones into. It will have pinouts for analog signal within the USB-C (USB c standard is specd to include analog stereo).
The issue still remains that most phones have a lower quality DAC. Ones that are only good enough to provide good quality for bluetooth devices. The last phone line I know of that had a really good DAC built in there the LG V series phones (v20, v30, v40, v50).
How exactly would it be poor quality? You do understand that there are multiple codecs to choose from using Bluetooth, right? The codec impacts both quality and latency. Also, Bluetooth is a digital signal. The signal either gets sent or it doesn't, so whether the signal is "quality" should not matter.
Bluetooth isn't capable of higher quality audio transfer. Codecs by design remove portions of sound data with their compression and decompression. That's literally why they exist. You lose some quality. They just try to remove portions of audio you don't usually hear, but it is noticeable with high quality systems.
It's why your typical compressed digital song you get a hold of is around 2 1/2 MB. That's its hacked down form. You can get "lossless" songs at full quality, but the sizes will be closer to 30 MB. Bluetooth and the DAC's together can't handle that. If you want high quality, you can't use bluetooth.
The "digital" signal your talking about with Bluetooth is just that. A digital one, and that digital one is a conversion from the dac that dumbs the audio down into what can be sent and processed back in a timely manner.
Going from your phones dac straight to an analog system to wired headphones cuts the conversions needed in half. Instead of going from the phones dac to Bluetooth to the wireless headsets dac to the speakers, you just go from phones dac straight to the speakers. Your phones has a lot more space than those tiny earbuds, so phones will generally have a much better dac than the bt earbuds will. That's on top of the transfer limitations of Bluetooth.
Short and simplified version: your phone can have a better dac than bt earbuds and wired headphones allow you to skip over half the conversion and transfer process.
Most wireless earbuds will become useless bricks since they are designed to be really hard to repair and batteries degrade with charge cycles. So while you can get an earbud on a budget, they will need to be replaced much more frequently than a wired pair of earbuds at the same price.
I got mine pre-covid in 2019 for 30 bucks and they still hold over 4 hours playback time on a single charge and around 4-5 full charges in the charger box.
That's awesome, you're lucky. That is not the standard.
I'm glad you have had a good experience with yours, but that's the exception rather than the rule. I've been using the same pair of wired earbuds for 18 years (2004-2022), not being careful at all with them... They went through countless times in the laundry machine during my teenage years when I forgot them in the pocket and never had a problem... While both pairs of wireless earbuds I have had died within less than 18 months when I was careful with them.
That's why I won't be buying wireless junk. Even if they are cheaper than they used to be, they are less reliable and become ewaste quickly due to their hard to repair designs.
The only pair of repairable earbuds I am aware of are the galaxy buds live (the ones that look like kidney beans), but they don't stay in my ear, so I didn't buy it.
What kind of dumdum buys a "high end" android phone?
9/10ths of the 2/3 of the phones that have jacks are low tier cheapo phones. Only a few of the higher end specd android phones have audio jacks. The boost mobile phone you get from Walmart for $49 has the audio jack.
Because good luck finding a phone nowadays that's at a bit thicker than 1/4". (It's a shame really; I kinda miss those older, thicker phones...)
Would be better with XLR, but anyway, the jack is the standard that was used in the very first electric guitars.
I'm not sure why they chose that one at the time, but it was the same kind of connection used in telephone boards, so it was already a standard for audio long before the invention of electric guitars. The jack was invited in 1877. Makes sense to use something that already existed and had proven to be reliable and available.
The reason they're still used is for backward compatibility. Other cabled instruments and microphones have changed standards through the years, but because guitars need to be paired with all kinds of amplifiers and stomp boxes from various manufacturers from different decades, it's impossible for one brand to change the standard.
A curious fact is that the 1/4 jack is the longest running connection standard.
With many professionals using wireless cables these days, it could more easily be changed, but at the same time, since going without a cable also removes many of the issues with the jack, there's really no need to change it.
why xlr?
It locks, is more durable and balanced.
balanced?
It reduces noise from interference.
An unbalanced cable has two wires. A ground and the signal. The audio is the difference between the two. A guitar cable is unbalanced.
A balanced cable has 3 wires. A ground, a signal (+ hot) and a signal with opposite polarity (- cold). The receiver will flip the polarity of the cold signal and add the two signals. The result is that any interference that happens in the cable is also flipped on the cold signal and thereby cancels the interference on the hot signal.
Put in like math: let's say your audio is 3x and noise is 0.5y
An unbalanced cable would deliver 3x + 0.5y =noise being added to the output.
A balanced cable would deliver "hot" 3x + 0.5y and "cold" -3x +0.5y. The receiver flips the cold resulting in 3x+0.5y +3x -0.5y =6x + 0y. This can then be divided by 2 resulting in the correct 3x and no noise.
the guitar input is unbalanced?
Yeah, a guitar output is a mono unbalanced two wire 1/4" TS jack.
Of course there are people who make guitars with custom wiring, but the standard is TS. 2 wires: tip and sleeve.
You can use a stereo/balanced TRS jack with 3 wires,? (Tip, Ring Sleeve) but only because those are sort of compatible with TS. It won't actually be balanced.
so whyd you start off with saying it's balanced if it's unvalanced andbwhy dont guitars come balacned
I said it would be better for guitars to use XLR, because XLR are balanced.
ahhh, but quarter inchs jacks can be balanced too? also why dont they use xlr then
I wonder if it would be possible to use some jacks and a couple of cables to run Ethernet.
I guess so. The phoneline in my house only has two wires (middle pair of a rj11) so it could work just as well on a guitar cable. It runs at 20/2 mb, which is about maximum for this sort of line. Works alright for TV streaming and office work, but it's too slow for keeping up with the daily gigabytes of game updates.
Cuz quarter inch jackets are for mice
(and dainty jacks fall out. You can get an adapter if you really want it)
I think it's purely durability. Larger cords are harder to snap.
Why not rj45 or coax?
Why not bayonet?
You find that one out quickly when something yanks the cable hard.
The size of the internal wire, solder connection, strain relief, and especially the cable shield size are all factors.
The shield is most critical if you look at the length of wire an miniscule power of any instrument without a powered preamp. Even with a built in preamp the output impedance will be high from most circuits.
Think of it this way, high impedance is another way of saying there is a voltage signal but not much current is able to flow to or from the device. If you try to pull or push too much current the signal will disappear. When there is not much current flowing, the signal is much more susceptible to other signals and noise crossing the wire.
Most 3.5mm audio connectors have poor shielding, strain relief, and the actual connection points where the wires are soldered are terrible. With the way they are constructed, the solder connection must be done very quickly to avoid damaging the thin plastic insulation between the rings that make up the tip terminal. With the larger quarter inch connector, there is a lot more heat mass in the actual terminals and there is enough room to make solder terminals with heat isolation. This helps to match the terminal with a larger wire gage so that both surfaces can evenly wet with solder with a properly set iron temperature. In theory this leads to a far more robust connection.
Most 3.5mm cables are unshielded. This is fine for the low impedance (high current flow) of an amplifier output stage, but it is totally insufficient for the high impedance input of an instrument.
This is why instrument cables generally cost so much more too. You're buying more copper, an engineered cable that has more that just wires in an extruded plastic sleeve, and the connectors are special purpose, beefier, and more engineered for a specialty task.
Thanks that was a very clear explanation, i appreciate you ❤
Add to all that, back to the dawn of electric guitar, 1/4 inch connectors were simply much more common and readily available.
It became the defacto standard because its what was always used.
Telephone switchboards
While jumping and running on scene you want something sturdy not a whimpy 3.5mm jack.
Some folks don’t work shows and it shows 😜
gig boys
Because 3.5mm jacks suck. 6.3mm jacks are much more sturdy and can be easily mounted on 6mm or even thicker cable, which can also handle much more use.
Flimsy jack and thin cheap cable cable is asking for trouble during performance.
The only plus of 3.5mm and smaller 'phone jacks' is their size and in many applications it is much less important than reliability.
Don't adapters exist?
They do and make reliability even worse.
I cant imagin how many 3.5 cables I'd have ruined onstage....they are simplynot stromg enough.
It would get pulled out or the skinny little cord would break almost immediately
The 1/4" jacks became standard before metric ruled the world. Besides, 1/4" jacks are way sturdier than 3.5mm posts. Now if the metric guys came up with a 7.0mm jack - we can talk transition.
I wonder if a 6.5mm would be within tolerance to be compatible with 1/4" plugs.
I believe it is, it's not entirely uncommon to see both described. I'm in the U.S. and been working with audio my whole life, 1/4" is for sure the named standard but 6.5mm is often referenced due to the headphone size of 3.5mm often being called that size instead of the 1/8". Especially if you're looking to buy online,
Why headphones are referred to by 3.5mm and the rest (basically) is 1/4" is a silly thing but hey, I don't make the colloquialisms.
The only thing you'd want to watch out for is whether your cable is mono or stereo, which is independent from the barrel size, but does need the barrel to have 2 rings (TRRS vs. TRS), to complete the Tip Ring Sleeve connection.
But yeah, if you need 1/4" and can only find 6.5mm you'll be fine
any idea why jbs headphones do a 2.5 male and 3.5 male wire thing? also ik this is offtopic but im looking for headphones that i can use with my audio interface (ive an adapter if needed) and are wireless (so both wired and wireless in one). thoughts? (professional musician btw)
IIRC theirs are set to 2.5mm at the headphone with 3.5mm as for the device connector. This is pretty common for companies that want to make some form of proprietary connection.
Usually these decisions are media because proprietary connections make them more money selling three or four components of 0.02c cables turned into $5-$25 sales per cable. From a consumer perspective, the only upside to it is that having a replaceable cable can increase longevity, and I suppose from a company perspective in order to ensure 100% compatibility, best to sell your version. That way any 3rd party cables can be the problem.
I think 2.5mm used to be used more commonly on old dumb phones for those headsets and stuff like that. I still see them sometimes but these days it's mostly present on dual plugs like walkies, which is pretty much for mic and audio with a locking mechanism to keep it in place.
Currently I don't have any suggestions for wired/wireless headphones, I wish I did. At the moment my set is the Beyerdynamics DT 990 Pro, I was looking into a version with detachable cables but none that I came across also had wireless - though they're surely out there. It would be nice to have a set to swap between Bluetooth and plugged in.
if you find some online please tell me what model, you know muxh more so id greatlt appreciatw it
I kind of doubt it - the 1/4" tolerances are pretty tight.
why aren't phones and shit made with 1/4" jacks instead of 3.5mm jacks?
Ftfy: why aren't phones made with jacks?
If the only tool you have is a jack, every problem looks like a pallet.
Phones ≠ pallets
honestly, i had completely forgotten that some phones, for some completely unfathomable reason, lack an audio jack of any kind. if you are suffering through that, you have my condolences.
they are if you look outside apple
Most android phones don't have these... The only brands I have seen that still make phones with headphone jacks are Asus and Sony...
My wife's new Samsung has a headphone jack and I refuse to buy a new phone without one.
Wrong. According to GSMArena data 286 Android phone models with 3.5mm jack were released only this year out of 454 total, therefore almost 2/3 of Android devices still come with headphone jack.
I looked at the list... It seems that almost all of them are mid/low budget phones, while high end phones rarely come with a jack. As much as it pains me to say it, it makes sense, since people who buy expensive phones probably can afford a wireless set while people who buy budget phones are less likely to buy wireless headphones.
And you'd wrong again, because all mayor manufacturers offer affordable wireless headphones as well. You can get a decent pair for as low as $20 and great wireless headphones with active noise cancelling for $50.
I got a question thought.
I'm using heaphones made for the best audio quality, i use a quarter jack to my audio card or, for my phone, just add an adapter to 3.5.
But my phone is getting old, is it possible to keep a good audio quality, and the heaphones wich sound i like, but through bluetooth?
Because i've never experienced any good bluetooth converter, and neither did i found any good bluetooth headphones, and let's be honest i kinda don't want to buy a new expensive one after getting mine wich was already pretty expensive...
You want a bluetooth DAC. FiiO makes some decent ones. Only downside might be audio latency, but the quality should be there for budget audiophile headphones like the HD6XX
Audio latency isn't a priority for me, and since you mentioned it i've looked into the codec available (both on the phone i want and the dac) and it seems like FiiO is a very good option.
Thank you very much for the recommendation.
That won't give good quality because the phone sending the signal to the DAC is sending a poor quality signal. Sending a poor quality signal to a high quality DAC won't give you good audio.
However, all OP needs is just going to be a usb-c to 3.5mm audio jack to plug his headphones into. It will have pinouts for analog signal within the USB-C (USB c standard is specd to include analog stereo).
The issue still remains that most phones have a lower quality DAC. Ones that are only good enough to provide good quality for bluetooth devices. The last phone line I know of that had a really good DAC built in there the LG V series phones (v20, v30, v40, v50).
How exactly would it be poor quality? You do understand that there are multiple codecs to choose from using Bluetooth, right? The codec impacts both quality and latency. Also, Bluetooth is a digital signal. The signal either gets sent or it doesn't, so whether the signal is "quality" should not matter.
Bluetooth isn't capable of higher quality audio transfer. Codecs by design remove portions of sound data with their compression and decompression. That's literally why they exist. You lose some quality. They just try to remove portions of audio you don't usually hear, but it is noticeable with high quality systems.
It's why your typical compressed digital song you get a hold of is around 2 1/2 MB. That's its hacked down form. You can get "lossless" songs at full quality, but the sizes will be closer to 30 MB. Bluetooth and the DAC's together can't handle that. If you want high quality, you can't use bluetooth.
The "digital" signal your talking about with Bluetooth is just that. A digital one, and that digital one is a conversion from the dac that dumbs the audio down into what can be sent and processed back in a timely manner.
Going from your phones dac straight to an analog system to wired headphones cuts the conversions needed in half. Instead of going from the phones dac to Bluetooth to the wireless headsets dac to the speakers, you just go from phones dac straight to the speakers. Your phones has a lot more space than those tiny earbuds, so phones will generally have a much better dac than the bt earbuds will. That's on top of the transfer limitations of Bluetooth.
Short and simplified version: your phone can have a better dac than bt earbuds and wired headphones allow you to skip over half the conversion and transfer process.
Most wireless earbuds will become useless bricks since they are designed to be really hard to repair and batteries degrade with charge cycles. So while you can get an earbud on a budget, they will need to be replaced much more frequently than a wired pair of earbuds at the same price.
I got mine pre-covid in 2019 for 30 bucks and they still hold over 4 hours playback time on a single charge and around 4-5 full charges in the charger box.
That's awesome, you're lucky. That is not the standard.
I'm glad you have had a good experience with yours, but that's the exception rather than the rule. I've been using the same pair of wired earbuds for 18 years (2004-2022), not being careful at all with them... They went through countless times in the laundry machine during my teenage years when I forgot them in the pocket and never had a problem... While both pairs of wireless earbuds I have had died within less than 18 months when I was careful with them.
That's why I won't be buying wireless junk. Even if they are cheaper than they used to be, they are less reliable and become ewaste quickly due to their hard to repair designs.
The only pair of repairable earbuds I am aware of are the galaxy buds live (the ones that look like kidney beans), but they don't stay in my ear, so I didn't buy it.
What kind of dumdum buys a "high end" android phone?
9/10ths of the 2/3 of the phones that have jacks are low tier cheapo phones. Only a few of the higher end specd android phones have audio jacks. The boost mobile phone you get from Walmart for $49 has the audio jack.
Because good luck finding a phone nowadays that's at a bit thicker than 1/4". (It's a shame really; I kinda miss those older, thicker phones...)
Would be better with XLR, but anyway, the jack is the standard that was used in the very first electric guitars.
I'm not sure why they chose that one at the time, but it was the same kind of connection used in telephone boards, so it was already a standard for audio long before the invention of electric guitars. The jack was invited in 1877. Makes sense to use something that already existed and had proven to be reliable and available.
The reason they're still used is for backward compatibility. Other cabled instruments and microphones have changed standards through the years, but because guitars need to be paired with all kinds of amplifiers and stomp boxes from various manufacturers from different decades, it's impossible for one brand to change the standard.
A curious fact is that the 1/4 jack is the longest running connection standard.
With many professionals using wireless cables these days, it could more easily be changed, but at the same time, since going without a cable also removes many of the issues with the jack, there's really no need to change it.
why xlr?
It locks, is more durable and balanced.
balanced?
It reduces noise from interference.
An unbalanced cable has two wires. A ground and the signal. The audio is the difference between the two. A guitar cable is unbalanced.
A balanced cable has 3 wires. A ground, a signal (+ hot) and a signal with opposite polarity (- cold). The receiver will flip the polarity of the cold signal and add the two signals. The result is that any interference that happens in the cable is also flipped on the cold signal and thereby cancels the interference on the hot signal.
Put in like math: let's say your audio is 3x and noise is 0.5y An unbalanced cable would deliver 3x + 0.5y =noise being added to the output.
A balanced cable would deliver "hot" 3x + 0.5y and "cold" -3x +0.5y. The receiver flips the cold resulting in 3x+0.5y +3x -0.5y =6x + 0y. This can then be divided by 2 resulting in the correct 3x and no noise.
the guitar input is unbalanced?
Yeah, a guitar output is a mono unbalanced two wire 1/4" TS jack.
Of course there are people who make guitars with custom wiring, but the standard is TS. 2 wires: tip and sleeve.
You can use a stereo/balanced TRS jack with 3 wires,? (Tip, Ring Sleeve) but only because those are sort of compatible with TS. It won't actually be balanced.
so whyd you start off with saying it's balanced if it's unvalanced andbwhy dont guitars come balacned
I said it would be better for guitars to use XLR, because XLR are balanced.
ahhh, but quarter inchs jacks can be balanced too? also why dont they use xlr then
I wonder if it would be possible to use some jacks and a couple of cables to run Ethernet.
I guess so. The phoneline in my house only has two wires (middle pair of a rj11) so it could work just as well on a guitar cable. It runs at 20/2 mb, which is about maximum for this sort of line. Works alright for TV streaming and office work, but it's too slow for keeping up with the daily gigabytes of game updates.
Cuz quarter inch jackets are for mice
(and dainty jacks fall out. You can get an adapter if you really want it)
I think it's purely durability. Larger cords are harder to snap.
Why not rj45 or coax?
Why not bayonet?
You find that one out quickly when something yanks the cable hard.
You just have to yank back harder!
There's always a bigger yank somewhere.
Why not a quarter handspan or a six halver?
???