MYTH BUSTERS: THE CABLE DESTRUCTION TEST

Need to know whether gear is worth your cash? Who you gonna call...

Lightly inspired by the success of a particular TV show, April 2014 saw us slaying guitar’s sacred cows. We gave the TG verdict on such hot potatoes as whether heavy strings mean better tone (tell B.B. King and Billy Gibbons), if true bypass is better than buffered (not on a long cable run), and whether old batteries make pedals sound different (yes, amazingly, but only certain pedals – mostly old fuzzes). But to find out whether expensive cables are worth the money, we subjected our test cables to multiple rounds of gruelling misuse. “This debate,” we announced “is the stuff of all-out audiophile warfare.”

Three cables stepped up, one would emerge. Cable one: the thin lead that came free with your guitar, with moulded jacks. Cable two: a £20-ish functional workhorse with a thick outer sleeve and replaceable plugs. Cable 3: a premium model promising better isolation from interference, fancy wound cable to improve phase/midrange signal, 24K gold plugs and multiple insulation technologies to improve handling noise.

Here’s how they’d stack up to our tests…

1. SOUND TEST