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If you checked my post you'll see I said that I have no problem with paying for "quality" (implication being ones that don't break). Thing is, you can get that quality for £10-£15 a cable from the likes of kabl or award session.
^ Yeah pretty much @monquixote (or at least not the same, there may be subtle differences but I'm not convinced they're worth paying tons for considering how many other things make a bigger difference, not to mention that there are some things you can do to minimise, if not outright eliminate, those differences.)
I'd also add the caveat that "higher-end" doesn't necessarily mean "super-expensive". As I'm guessing you implied with the Kabl reference.
Because I like tweed.
My cables don't get a lot of abuse though. Have a red 'cable guys' cable 3m, £12 a few years ago, no signs of falling apart yet. The planet waves patch cables I've got look more flimsy.
However I now feel pretty confident microphonic cables are not a thing. At the level where you can hear the body of the guitar resonate in response to the shock on the cable you still can't hear anything when the cable is clamped down. The physics doesn't really work anyway unless the insulation is so thin the capacitance is significant, maybe if you had really bad jacks or, of course, you tried to design them that way.
Reliability is another thing of course and a sensible reason to go for decent quality.
You've obviously never come across a microphonic cable then .
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
*An Official Foo-Approved guitarist since Sept 2023.
*An Official Foo-Approved guitarist since Sept 2023.
Kind of what I was getting at but didn't want to get into too much of a ramble about caveats, you need relative movement (it being change in capacitance that's needed), and they need to get quite close, and unless there's a really bad hot spot you need this along a significant portion of the length (since it's the length of the cable that racks up the capacitance). Since plastic is cheaper than copper even cheapish cables would have to really try to get this wrong (I generally avoid the cheapest ones since jacks are usually terrible). I guess if the cable itself is microphonic then it's incredibly frequency dependent and orientation dependent and you'd also get noise just from moving the thing.
They tend to rustle when you move them. I wouldn't say particularly orientation-dependednt - more or less any movement seems to do it. It also only happens when there's either a signal going through it or if the amp has a tiny DC leak from the first valve stage (not uncommon) obviously, since otherwise there is no signal produced.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
I like the cable , very slim and flexible , yes they are a bit of a fiddle to strip back. Though my friend and I set ourselves up a little production line one afternoon. I was doing the stripping , and he the soldering (He is a electronics engineer so I also got a soldering lesson , he makes it look so easy using a tiny amount of solder). The cables are now over 3 years old and some gigged a fair amount and all working well. What we also did was put our names on the cables with clear heat shrink so they don't get aquired by others at gigs ....
I originally had planet waves silent , and they were very poor. I still have a "curly" I bought back in the 70's .... haven't tried it in years . I must plug it in and see what happens :-) Perhaps I can sell it on Ebay as a classic relic lead .....
I've Wisdom'd you !
Well made, good service, and a free plectrum no less !!!!!!!!!!
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*An Official Foo-Approved guitarist since Sept 2023.