I can vouch for WildBill. I spent about $25 on a "high end" Planet Waves speaker cable for one of my cabs then a few weeks later made one of equal length out of 15 year old left over 16 gauge speaker wire and some radio shack 1/4" connectors. I've AB'd them and honestly cannot tell the difference at all. IMO there is absolutely no tone advantage to $$$ "high end" speaker cable.
My .02
Smart man! Not for agreeing with me but for actually testing something out instead of just going along with the crowd!:food-smiley-004:
I should state that there ARE tone differences with some GUITAR cords! Not necessarily because of the brand but rather how they are made.
Guitar cords use a woven wire braid that surrounds an insulated centre wire. The overall braid acts like a shield to keep out noise, hum and country radio stations.
Like anything else, you get what you pay for. There are good cables and cheap crap!
What makes a good cable is quite simple. There are only two major factors to worry about. One is simple mechanical durability. Guitar cords must be flexible but rugged, including the ends. Cheap ends tend to break!
The other is the quality of the engineering behind how the cable was made. There will always be a capacitance between the inside of the shield and the outside skin of the centre conductor. It will act like a bypass capacitor, shorting out higher treble frequencies.
Good cable will have specs published in a catalog somewhere that will show this capacitance value in terms of pf per foot. Pf stands for picofarad, which is a very low value of capacitance and normally would be too trivial to matter to a guitar signal.
The kicker is "per foot". That cap value adds up foot by foot and if the cord gets to be quite long the total can be enough to suck a lot of highs! 'Course, you can always turn up the treble control...:smile:
Some cable has a much worse "pf per foot" value than others. Cheap stuff tends to have a very high value. Generally, nobody will tell you the specs on cheap stuff so that's a dead giveaway there!
All that being said, once the price gets high enough pretty well everybody's guitar cords are more than good enough!
Still, I agree that rolling your own saves money and gives you the best results. Belden 8410 cable and decent ends like SwitchCraft or Nutrik will give years of good service.
:food-smiley-004: