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.
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.