I want to repair a display cable which I suspect has some broken wires. The cable seems to be wrapped in a metallized fibre cloth. (I don't know the correct name for it).
What purpose, apart from holding the individual wires together, does the sheath serve? Does the metal (assuming it's metal) have something to do with RF noise?
If I was to replace the entire jacket/sheath with heatshrink, is there any functionality I risk losing?
The signals going to the display are quite high frequency.
That conductive shield shields the radio-frequency emissions of those signal wires, this prevents these emissions from the product violating EMI emission rulings but also it helps to prevent other sensitive circuits in the product (for example a microphone or WiFi receiver) from being disturbed.
It is very well possible that everything will work as expected even without the shield, however there are no guarantees. The sane/easy choice is to simply keep some form of shield in place to prevent issues.
