Re: What is the best Mic Cable package for the money?
Here's what I've figured out after a bunch of years in the business:
1. The cheap stuff not worth buying. As others have said, it may work fine now, but a failure in the middle of a critical show is probably going to hurt you far, far more than the $10 more a good cable would have cost.
2. Anything without a chuck-type strain relief is worthless (read: anything other than Neutrik is junk). Even the Chinese Neutrik clones have fit/finish issues and sometimes don't fit into mics properly, or the latches break.
3. Ends fail more often than the cable itself, provided good cable is used. And properly installed Neutrik ends almost never fail.
4. (Puts on review/marketing hat) CBI makes custom mic cables cheaper than I can do it myself buying ends and cable separately, and this is not even considering my labor time. Additionally, I have never had a CBI cable fail in any way. I think Marlow is using my old CBI MLU cables now, and you could easily substitute them for rope and repel off a cliff...I switched to the MLNQ quad cable just because it coils so nice, and now I'm using the Neutrik XX series ends. I sell the MLN 'regular' mic cables to customers all the time and have never had a callback or cable failure. And of course, CBI has all the other nice brands of cable (I really, really like Belden 1192A), but are any of those other brands really that much more durable than CBI's custom cables? Maybe, maybe not...
When it comes right down to it, spending $25 per cable once every 10 years (or maybe more) is worth the investment, at least in my opinion.