I didn’t think I’d ever get to the point of asking for this product specifically, but are there any recommendations for 3.5mm TRS male to male cables, suitable for headphones, available for purchase from mainland US, and preferably 10ft?
In the past year, the original cable that came with my SHP9500’s started to exhibit problems, and had to be replaced after ~5 years of regular use. This past year, I had replaced it with a cable from KabelDirekt, which failed in about 7 months. KabelDirekt’s warranty handling simply refunded my purchase rather replace the broken cable, so I took it as a sign that they weren’t confident in their products and to try a different company. I then went with a Monoprice cable, which I have gone through three of. None of the three so far have lasted more than 3 weeks, and Monoprice is asking to have the existing faulty cables returned via a rather inconvenient shipping provider before sending another.
Right now, I have stolen my record player’s RCA to 3.5mm cable and an RCA-3.5mm adapter, which is working for the time being. Unfortunately, it does seem that the manufacturer (Ugreen) has stopped selling audio cables however, nor do I really want to be stuck with an adapter chain off of my audio interface.
Good headphone cables are made with tinsel wire, for far more flexing cycles than typical stranded audio cables. This page has close-up photos showing how it differs from ordinary stranded wire.
From a BIFL perspective, you want to be able to stick a good metal 3.5mm jack with strain relief onto whatever cable you end up with. It isn’t easy to solder, but here are some tips on how to do it:
Definitely a good thing to keep in mind. Doing a bit of further research, depending on the composition of the tinsel wire, it’s seems feasible to DIY a cable with soldered connections to 3.5mm male plugs, albeit with some extra material spent as practice to get technique, temperature, and time correct.
Unless I happen to find a premade cable that is suitable for conversion out of old hardware, it definitely seems like actually sourcing woven tinsel wire in suitable thickness for a headphone cable is quite the challenge (for a reasonable price anyway).
If nothing else, the Syncwire cable is cheap enough to be a good value, provided it does last a while.
What clues are there in they syncwire listing that made you think that it’s made from tinsel wire. I’m just asking for future use.
It’s advertised to be suitable as a headphone cord (not just a headphone extension cord or aux cord).
The cable is quite slender, <4mm OD (compare it to the 3.5mm plug in the photo). Yet it has a braided jacket, probably over a PVC jacket. That combo takes up more width than a PVC jacket alone. Therefore, the inner cores must be slender.
Slender conventional inner cores in a wire advertised for headphone use would likely result in low reliability and bad reviews. But this cable has good reviews.
Therefore, it’s probably made with tinsel wire.
N.B. Any pair of headphones/earphones (and old broken pair, or from a junk shop etc) likely has tinsel wire. Most headphones/earphones use captive cables, but you can always just snip the cable at the headphone end, solder on a 3.5mm plug (see tips in earlier comment), and thereby make yourself a cable that will work with headphones that have a 3.5mm socket.
Just to do a bit of sanity checking on my end and because I still have the dead KabelDirekt cable for reference, I chopped and dissected the cable for speculation. I am first shocked at how good of reviews such a cable can get for its construction choices. The outer ground is of good size, but both stereo channels use tiny 26 or 28 awg 10-strand copper, which is no wonder the thing failed in under a year. Everything in the cable appears to be regular stranded copper. The PVC sheath on this cable is about 4mm, same as the (presumably pvc sheath plus) braided Syncwire cable. KabelDirekt’s comparable braided cable is about 5mm by comparison. The review distribution between the PVC KabelDirekt and Syncwire cables are nearly the same, which makes me wonder how bad a cable really has to be for the reviews to significantly dip.