XLR cable quality questions

[infinitesymphony]

Ah, interesting... I thought it probably wasn't a star-quad cable due to the specs, and the ground wire makes it similar to the Belden 1800F, which is the cable I really wanted, but it couldn't be found in short lengths.

The DA-202's capacitance is much lower than the popular star-quad L-4E6S (15 pF/ft vs. 46 pF/ft), which should make it roughly equivalent to 1800F (13 pF/ft). Not that capacitance means everything.

 

[infinitesymphony]

All of my parts arrived today--Markertek's pretty fast! It appears that they didn't bother to measure my cable run, because I wound up with over 12 feet of extra cable. I'll be ordering from them again!

I just finished assembling my first cable with the Neutrik EasyCon solder-less connectors. They were a bit of a PITA, but I'll chalk most of it up to the fact that this is the first cable I've ever built. There's no good way to hold the wires in place during assembly, but once the top half snaps on, it feels secure.

I'm auditioning it by using it between a Naiant MSH-1 omni microphone and an E-MU 0404 USB and recording the input into Cubase at 24-bit/88.2 kHz. Wow... This setup sounds extremely good! I'm very, very happy.

 

[infinitesymphony]

I think that the EasyCon diagram threw me off... I made a second cable but the signal was much quieter than on the other, so I decided to test continuity between the pins. Pin 1 leads to pin 1, pin 2 leads to pin 3, and pin 3 leads to pin 2. Whomever designed the color version of the EasyCon guide screwed up! I should've been paying more attention to the numbers instead of the colors.

Edit: I've corrected the wire orientation and checked with a multimeter. Now I have fully-functional balanced cables.