Believe it or not, there is a right and wrong way to shorten those long cables in your system.

The best way is to cut the cable to the correct length and re-terminate it. However, that is not always an option.

If you coil the wire up like a rattle snake, you make an antenna. This antenna can bite you with some nasty noise venom. Not only does coiling the wire open a lot of loop area, the loop is concentrated because it occupies the same loop area more than once.

If you fold the cable in half and then put it in a bundle, the loop area is greatly reduced.

I've seen this make a difference in electrical instrumentation more than once! One of these times it took about 1.4V to cause a noise problem and we were seeing noise problems. Folding the excess cable in half and then bundling it fixed the problem.