Cable Madness

There's a guy who works here named Pat. On any given day you can walk in our store and see him at the front counter working on something. Recently, he called a few of us over to his computer to show us something truly unbelievable: A two thousand dollar guitar cable.

I'll give you a minute.

Two. Thousand. Dollars. For a guitar cable. This is madness (Not Sparta). This is insane. The manufacturer claims that it is functionally perfect. I guess that's pretty awesome. Either way, Pat made a valid point while we were all losing our minds over this. He said "If I had a $500,000 guitar rig...and I mean guitar and amplifier, I wouldn't want anything less than this connecting them."

Not Pictured: Dignity

Oh, alright. I guess that makes sense.

So now I'm sitting at my desk a week later, writing this article, when it hits me that I should look into this cable some more. I needed to know what the hype was. So, I went to Google and typed in "World's Most Expensive Guitar Cable."

Words cannot describe what I found. I found a cable that was triple the cost of the first one Pat found...and it was only half as long. That's right. $6,000 for a ten foot cable. I feel like crying. I need to stop. I guess we've really been hinting at cables like this for a long time. A while back a certain company popped up touting the "best of the best" in home theater cables. This being such a huge market, people began looking into what the real difference was between a $200 component cable and a $5 component cable. The truth is that there wasn't a difference.

Now, I'm not saying there is a direct correlation between home theater cables and instrument cables, but hear me out. A cable carries a signal from your guitar to your amplifier. As long as all your solder joints are there, and everything is totally intact, the difference between cables as far as sound quality goes is pretty insignificant. In my opinion, that is. This didn't stop me from just recently picking up a very nice Planet Waves cable for $60. Why? It's 20 feet long, very rugged, has a new cable end that ensures a tight connection every time, and comes with a lifetime warranty.

I've bought cheap cables for years, and I've broken cheap cables for years. One of the cheapest I've ever owned I used during a show. Mind you, I played in a punk band at the time and we liked to move around a lot. I got a little excited and stepped on my cable, pulling it down and out of my amp. It didn't seem like a big deal until I tried to plug back in and realized the tip broke off inside my Marshall. Luckily I could borrow an amp from another band and keep on playing, but it still really sucked. $60 later, I had a new input jack sans half a cable tip.

The moral of the story is really just this: Don't buy into the crazy cable hype. Do your research before throwing down big money on a cable. There are some companies, such as Planet Waves and Whirlwind, that offer a better cable at a slight premium, but it's totally worth it. Six grand on a cable? To me, that's an insane amount of money. Oil sheik money.