The impedance of the cables reading out the calorimeter cells has an impact on the rate at which the charge is extracted from the cells.  the planar geometry of the cells causes each readout channel to look like a capacitor at the detector end of the readout cable.  This capacitance and the cable impedance forms and integrating RC circuit that delays the transfer of the image charge produced in the cell into the preamp.   A cable with lower impedance reduces the RC delay time constant.

The difference in cable lengths for different channels needs to be small compared to the pulse shaping time, to prevent systematic channel-to-channel variations in response.  The replacement of the external cables was used as an opportunity to adjust the lengths of the new cables to minimize the total propagation delay differences between calorimeter cells and preamps.

The spread in the cable lengths within the different  sections of the electromagnetic (EM) calorimeter is reduced after replacement of cables.  The spread in the cable lengths for the hadronic (HD) calorimeter is increased.