Bennett Prescott wrote on Wed, 29 November 2006 19:57 |
...I have to admit that I haven't opened mine yet. Have any other LABsters used one, and what did you think? I don't play guitar :/
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What, you can't use it on one of your double-barrel harpsichords?
OK, my turn. I took a store-bought guitar cable with the standard plugs and lopped off a 3-foot hunk, on which I went and installed a standard Neutrik nickel-plated plug from my inventory and am now using it as a stomp box patch cable. The remaining 22 feet with a newly bare end would be my test application for the aforementioned sample. My first impression is that it is an aesthetic tour de force, which is not surprising with Neutrik, and unlikely you will mistake it for a Switchcraft (more on that later). As an old advocate of nickel-plated all-metal-barreled plugs, I was a bit skeptical of this crimson-shelled beauty, especially knowing that an instrument cable will spend some time lying on stage where it can be stepped on. So I gave it the boot test, first standing on it wearing Doc Marten-type footwear on a hardwood floor. The plug survived, so it gets the thumbs-up for use by punk-rock bands. Next I tried snakeskin Nocona cowboy boot heels, a more stringent test, and this plug gets the OK for country-western bands as well.
It turns out the red barrel is not molded plastic, but enameled or lacquered bronze of a pretty good wall thickness, so much for judging a book by its cover. I didn't do a test of the wear-resistance of the coating, but did find that it is scratchable.
Gold plated throughout, including the solder points, I knew this plug would be a breeze to solder. Now as for what I said earlier, with a Switchcraft or other brand conventional plug, a common mistake is to solder the leads on without first sliding the barrel on up the cable. (Doh!) With this plug, the reverse is true; you don't put the barrel on until after the wiring is soldered. Think Speakon. The center conductor has a handy solder cup; the shield has nothing but the semi-cylindrical sleeve to solder to (no tab or clamp), but being gold, it attaches readily.
In actual use, it works just as advertised. When unplugged, it does short out the cable, and totally eliminates the pop when plugging and unplugging, plus any hum or buzz that might be picked up when handling the bare plug, or any other stray hum from lying around open-circuited on the floor. I tried it with a solid-body electric and with an EA. One thing crossed my mind is whether this is available in a 90-degree angle plug. The straight configuration is just perfect for Stratocaster-type instruments, but there are some guitars, such as my Ovation EA, whose jack is on the back bowl where a straight plug would stick right out into the guitarist's leg. So I did some snooping and found that the NP2RX-AU-SILENT is available for just another half-buck. Life is good.
I hope these are distributed only to those who are intelligent enough NOT to use them to connect speakers to power amplifiers!