Thanks, Frank.

As I pointed out before, the benefits of Gepco are the price and
customer service, especially out here from the Burbank office (ask for
Kurt Stein). Yes it's stiffer than Belden, but in many applications that
doesn't really matter. I did a very substantial installation in a
producer's house in Sherman Oaks last year, using the thin profile
5526GFC series, which I picked over the 5596 due to the massive amount
of cable we needed to pull through fairly small raceways. We pulled
several pieces of it over 100' runs around 90 degree bends, and while
not easy, it did work.

As Mogami, I have no use for it anymore. The price has gotten to be
astronomical, and, while arguably it sounds fine, it isn't worth the
extra expense. If it's used with Elco/Edac connectors, the prep time is
longer, since the only sure way of getting a good crimp with the 25AWG
pairs is to fold each stripped end over to double the thickness. (In
anticipation of incoming comments, I don't consider crimping and
soldering a viable method, for several reasons.)Also, the shielding,
being a single served stranded shield, ls pretty crappy. In many
environments, with balanced outputs and inputs this won't matter. But
I've seen people try to use Mogami in areas with high EMI fields, and
have found it to be a problem. Replacing it with any cabling with a
denser shield cures the problem.

Also, not to seem to be ragging on Mogami too much more, but the
published capacitance specs in their data sheets have never been able to
be duplicated by either myself, or anyone I know.



Frank Stearns wrote:

Thanks to Stephen Anderson, Arny Krueger, Scott Dorsey, and Mike Rivers
for excellent advice on the topic of snakes a while back.

I've now got samples from Belden and Gepco, with Mogami on the way.

A couple of observations:

1. If buying from Markertek, the Belden snake costs aren't too bad (about
20-30% less than any local Belden distributor I could find). This puts
Belden at roughly the same price as buying the equivalent products
directly from Gepco.

2. All the Gepco products, even the single pair mic cable equivalents,
seem much stiffer than Belden, For example, a 3 ft section of Gepco 8
pair AES-EBU (Gepco 559608GFC) held straight out simply won't droop.
It'll stick out there, like a goofy-looking sword.

But a similar configuration of Belden (1805F) does droop down so that the
far end points at the floor as one would expect. Might be a pain to lay
out the Gepco stuff nice and flat. (As far as I could tell, the
application for this Gepco product included portable snake use, not just
fixed installations.)

While the electrical performance specs nearly the same, the BIG advantage
to Gepco is that they will cut to length and give you a pretty good price
for less than 1000 feet; Belden makes you buy 500 ft minimum. (They
apparently used to sell 100 and 250 ft spools, but those are no more.)

If anyone is interested, I'll make another post once I have the Mogami
samples in hand.

Thanks again.
Frank

--
Stephen Anderson

~At the end of the day, it's all about
the music