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
--