Assuming one is handy with a soldering iron, are there savings to be had in buying connectors and a spool of high quality cabling and having at?

Are there are any problems with a plan such as this? Would I be in for a world of hurt?

I think it really depends on how much free time you have and how customized your cabling needs to be.

You can get good connectors (neutrik, switchcraft) for $2-3 each, depending on which type. I use canare star quad, which is $0.36/foot from markertek. So for a 20 foot mic cable, you are talking somewhere in the $12-13 range. Thats really pretty damn good considering it is far better quality than your basic $15 guitar center mic cable.

The problem is that this shit takes a long time (at least for me). You have to cut the cable to length, strip the outer insulation, unbraid the shield (which really sucks), strip the insulation on the 4 wires, tin the wires and the connector, blah blah blah.... If it weren't for the huge advantage of being able to get everything the exact length with the exact connectors I needed, I might have just bought some premade because I'm too f'in busy.

Oh, and a cable tester is a really good investment IMO.

I've built pretty much every cable in my basement (save for the two fancy digital cables) and would highly recommend it. You can set up a little bench and do it while you're watching TV and after the first few dozen it becomes rote. If you do it right (good materials, heat shrink, etc.) your cables will last a long time - plus you can actually repair them if they break.

Dan

Hey guys,

I'll definitely second the others' comments. Making your own cables is kinda fun and it teaches you to solder.

From my experience, the best materials to work with are the Neutrik connectors and Mogami Quad cable. I tend to pay the extra money for the Mogami cable instead of the Canare because of the type of shield used. Canare's shielding material is woven, brittle, and of unknown composition. When you are trying to gather enough of the shield together to connect it to Pin 1 it often acts like Chinese handcuffs and is difficult to work with (due to its weaving). Also, it being kinda brittle, the shielding sheds alot of mini pieces of metal all over the place.

Mogami, on the other hand, has what seems to be a pure copper shield that, while being stranded, is wrapped rather than woven around the wires. This makes attaching the shield to Pin 1 much easier.

All in all, making XLR or 1/4" terminated cables is a worthwhile project. Bantam terminated cables are not worth the trouble in my opinion. The amount saved by doing it yourself would be miniscule and soldering all of those tiny connectors would be shitty.

Best of luck,

Dan

Hey, thanks for the great advice, everyone.

danmaksym, where do you go for the bulk supplies?

What can I expect to pay?

Hey,

I usually get my supplies from www.redco.com. They have a great selection of cable types and connectors and they're pretty inexpensive. I've also ordered from www.markertek.com and they're okay but their selection wasn't as vast as Redco's.

You might also want to get yourself one of those "extra hand" helper/gripper thingies that hold your components for you while you are soldering. If I had one of those, I would've been able to do the work alot faster. For me, the biggest pain in the ass is keeping the barrel of the connector from rolling around while I'm trying to solder a specific pin. Beyond that, it's no sweat.

This is all really invaluable. Thanks!

The last time I made cables I got a long spool, 500 feet from a company called Clark. I forget the exact cost, but my friend and I figured it out that our cables cost about $6-8 or so to make. The cables varied in lenght (depending on how we cut them) from 10 to 20 feet.

People already mentioned this, but the two best things to have while making cables is a vice or arm to hold them, and a friend to help you. Actually, having a few people helps, because two people can soider connections while one person gets stuck trying to get the covering off all those little wires.

It's well worth it in the long run even though you might have to shell out what seems to be a lot up front to by the spool and connectors.

I don't know if anyone else had this experience, but we found making TRS connectors far more of a bitch than making XLR to XLR. We also had to make a set of XLR to TRS for our genelic speakers and that was a pain and we screwed one up because we got the connection to the sleve wrong.

http://www.clarkwc.com/