guitar cables: a rant

Dropped into the most convenient guitar store on the way home tonight to buy a couple of patch cables for my ever growing collection of stomp boxes. All the reasonably prices cables by Fender, Ibanez, Canare, and their house brand have disappeared. In their place is a range of expensive premium cables. The cheapest patch cable was over $US20. There was not a single 3m cable for less than $US30. Monster cables were in fact reasonably priced compared to the others.

So I walked down to my favourite shop and exactly the same thing except no Monster rubbish. There was a guy asking the shop keeper if there was any Monster cables available and the guy apologised but pointed out that Custom Audio Japan (?) are the best and (because?) they are made in Japan. 5000yen for a fricking cable!!!!! That's over $US40. Absolutely no sign of Canare my favourite cables - good qualtiy sturdy and appropriately priced.

If you have a few stomp boxes you need two guitar cables and two patch cables you are going to pay $US130 for fricking cables!!!!

I know why, guitar shops make nothing out of a $10 cable but make a good profit from expensive ones. Anything other than Fender, Ibanez or Canare cables is a waste of money.

Brett

ORIGINAL: krizrox

http://www.nbscables.com/products/new.html

So I guess these are out of the question then?

Holy.. $#!% if you wanted better sound for that kind of money I think you could just hire the real band to come to your home and play.

I think we need a metric for "better". For example a "cable that will not work at all" is 0 and "a dog can't hear the difference" is 1000, how about we call these snipe units. That way you can assign a vaule to each dollar you spend on cables. If it's 16 snipe units better and you paid 16 dollars more then the cable you are using, then it's costing you one dollar per snipe unit to upgrade. If you paid 160 dollars more for the cable then each snipe unit ended up costing you 10 dollars. Each person could then assign a person value to the snipe unit of a cable. For example I don't like to pay more then $1 per snipe, and because I can't hear a difference of more then 10 snipe I should never pay more then $10 extra for a cable... right ?

his problem is his location... Tokyo.

BD

ORIGINAL: bill durham

his problem is his location... Tokyo.

BD

There's a lot of truth in that. But lots of things here are reasonably priced. Guitars, mic and synths etc are reasonably priced. Joemeek stuff is just about the same price online from the states. Specialist stuff like Doepfer modular synths are ridiculous prices though.

The funny thing about the guy asking about the expensive cables was that he played metal!!!

I've got to get into this audiophile stuff somehow. I've seen 1m shielded power cables for $US700 and gold shielded optical cables.

How can cables give you a silent disconnect?

Brett

Hi Brett,

If I understood you correctly, you need cables for your stompboxes? Why don't you get cables that are 6 inches or less, it'll save you money and sound better(if your patching a zillion pedals). I myself use 3-inch cables under thse circumstances.
Canare Cables are Japanese, and yes, they are great.