Cable Testers - what's good?

fretmeister

I could do with a cheap cable tester.

I have decades worth of old cables or various types and I could do with throwing out the bad ones.

Is the cheap-ish Behringer one worth having?

Danny1969

None are worth having in my opinion,I have an RS one which is pretty good but they only really show open or dead shorts .... Ok for speaker cables but nothing else

fretmeister

Oh.

In that case I might just bin everything that's been in my spares bag for 5 years. I've not used them in that time.

Mkjackary

I know it will be a PITA but just plugging them all into a practice amp and move the connectors about to see if they work, or only at certain angles (ie you will have to hold it at an angle to use it).

Would take a while but would be cheaper than a tester, and you still have to plug in/unplug with a tester, so wouldn't be that much quicker I wouldn't have thought.

simonk

Good old fashioned multi meter?

wayneirie

Behringers fine, I use mine all the time. For testing multis and patch boxes, shows intermittent connections. Has a noise generator. Probably the best thing they make.

Sporky

What simonk said. A multimeter will tell you more than a continuity meter will. Usefully more.

Danny1969

My mate John has got a Behringer cable tester and we were midi'ing up my rig to a behringer foot controller and ultrapro FX unit. As were having no luck he decided to test the midi lead, the Behringer tester reported it as faulty. That's the fault says John and gabs another midi lead, that doesn't work either and the tester fails that one. After the tester failed a third midi lead I got suspicious and took the tester apart and saw one of the wires on the 5 pin din socket wasn't even soldered on! The midi control thing was cured by using a GT10 to switch things. The Behringer tester was fixed. If you buy anything Behringer beware, for every good unit there's probably 2 bad units out there. 

I only use actual audio to test cables these days as a cable tester won't fail a cable on microphonic handling noise, loss of high end due to capacitive loading when inner core is stetched to micro thin but still acting as an insulator. Balanced mic lead fault when one conductor is no longer antiphase of the other. Best test is to use the lead to pass audio test signal and then move every bit of the cable while your recording the audio into a DAW, you can then literally see the faults occur. 

Sporky

Certainly bunging audio down is an excellent test and will find things that a multimeter won't (or at least won't with anything like the ease and speed).

But if the audio doesn't pass correctly then a multimeter can be jolly useful.

Ianpdq

Multi meter with down to one ohm scale you can tell if there is a problem you normally get a high resistance that is how I test them 

bob21

All this multimeter/audio/etc stuff is nice and valuable test kit - however, there are times in real pro audio where it's just not possible to spend the time to do this.. If I need to prove a cable as good or bad on a gig, I'm not going to be using a meter, or if I'm checking 120 XLRs in a show prep, I pretty much only care if they're dead short or open..

In this case the tools in the toolbox are:

Behringer CT100. Literally every jobbing audio engineer I know has one. Pretty decent tester, albeit no speakons. Nice intermittent function (reset it, wiggle cable, if light comes on it's got an intermittent fault).

Studiospares Ultimate Cable Tester - this is great, includes speakon nl4 and nl8 (we use lots of NL8). also the newer ones do Cat5. No intermittent function like the above sadly. No off switch to forget to turn off which is a bonus!

In case anyone cares, other options we use include

Rat Sniffer/Sender - this is a split tester, with two units - so you don't need both ends of the cable together. slightly more fiddly to read.

Earplug - this is either a pink noise generator or a small amp and speaker - pretty much i'm only looking to prove a line carries noise at this point. handy in odd occasions to prove lines without using kit that may also have fault conditions.

If you have time, and the knowledge to properly interpret the results, then proper test kit is great - but if not, and for a casual 'does this work' one of the above options (top two especially) will work fine.

xwolf5150

I've used my Whirlwind tester for years. Has proved useful on many occasions.
I plug the leads in and wiggle them to test for a fault.
The big flaw was that it didn't tell me that I forgot to trim the inner shield on a cable I made last week. It tested perfect but sounded shit. Lol.

Danny1969

wolf5150 said:

I've used my Whirlwind tester for years. Has proved useful on many occasions.
I plug the leads in and wiggle them to test for a fault.
The big flaw was that it didn't tell me that I forgot to trim the inner shield on a cable I made last week. It tested perfect but sounded shit. Lol.

This is kinda my point

xwolf5150

Danny1969;1035493" said:

wolf5150 said:

I've used my Whirlwind tester for years. Has proved useful on many occasions.

I plug the leads in and wiggle them to test for a fault.

The big flaw was that it didn't tell me that I forgot to trim the inner shield on a cable I made last week. It tested perfect but sounded shit. Lol.





This is kinda my point

I originally bought it because I'd invested in some expensive cables for my powered speakers and discovered that the fault I attributed to a speaker was in fact a faulty cable.
Had I had a tester then it would have saved me a lot of wasted time and money sending the speaker away for testing. Plus the humble pie I had to eat when they diagnosed it as a cable. Lol.
Its since helped me identify many issues for other artists and myself and I regard it as a very important tool in my spares case.

xwolf5150

Thats mine.
http://www.whirlwinduk.com/tester/