Question:
Monster Cable brand cables are cheap imported crap that are guaranteed to fall apart. I had a bass player who went through a half dozen before giving up. At first he bragged on the Monster/GC lifetime replacement warranty until he got tired of taking crap cables back to GC for exchange. Monster Cable is all marketing and no performance. Monster is now carried by Radio Shack. What else do you really need to know about it?
Answer:
Actually, it's the *good* stuff that has that. The conductive insulation you ran across isn't insulation, it's electrostatic shielding. This can be plastic or cloth based; Canare cable uses plastic and Belden uses cloth. It's there to reduce mechanically generated noises; high-impedance cable can be quite microphonic, and can also make scritchy-scratchy noises when it's slithered around on the floor. This is due to random stray charges generated within the cable itself (like static electricity) and also to changes in cable capacitance as the wire flexes, slightly changing the distance between the outer shielding and the inner conductor. If you're making your own cables and you encounter what appears to be an extra layer of insulation between the center conductor and the shield, take care to remove it from the exposed portion of the center conductor before you solder everything in place. If *any* of it touches the copper portion of the center conductor, you will have a high-resistance short from tip to sleeve; as you found out, using the low-ohms range on your meter to check from tip to sleeve will *not* detect this condition. What appeared to be a perfectly good cable when you were finished making it became a source of signal attenuation in the field. (BTW, this is *another* reason not to use solderless connectors; you cannot *see* the actual connections inside the plugs, and all kinds of bogus crud could be in there.) I learned early on that whenever I sell someone a piece of good- quality cable, I'll either need to spend five minutes (now) telling the dude (or dude-ette) how to prepare it for soldering or spend ten minutes (later) listening to him/her bitch about the shitty cable I sold. For guys what rolls their own, here's the best combo I've found: Canare GS-6 cable and Switchcraft 280 plugs. I know the temptation is to use the snazzy-looking Neutrik plugs; they are hard to solder to without a *really* powerful iron, and the strain relief system is bogus. They cost twice as much, too. Stick with the Switchcraft; they were good enough for Grampaw and they're *still* the best. (I sell both kinds, in case anyone is wondering.) If you want to make a cable that is damn near indestructible, use a piece of 3/8 HST over the inner part of the plug; fill the inner portion with hot-glue and slide the shrink over the glue while it's still hot; it'll begin to shrink immediately. Finish shrinking it with your heat- gun (or a 1000W Par-64 can, or a propane torch set on low, or a cigarette lighter, or a hot-air popcorn popper [all of which I have used successfully in the field]) and wait for it to cool before removing any glue that squished out the edges while you were shrinking it. This is the *best* termination system that I've been able to devise; I have guitar cables in the field that are still going strong after more than a decade of use
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