Cordinated Cables – Review

It was great to feature Cordinated Cables during Free Shirt Wednesday with their pins. Juli sent over a couple of cables for me to check out, so I thought I would take the opportunity to give the cables a pretty thorough ride to see what they’re all about and see how they hang with the ‘big boys’.

Now before I get into that, I wanted to quickly describe what/why/how Cordinated Cables came about.  Both Juli and her husband (Dan) have both been musicians for 15+ years. She is a graphic designer and Dan is an engineer by trade. Dan started to make cables and Juli was involved with knitting about other things, and discovered that the two can be combined to give something boring (cables) something with some unique character and individuality.

I definitely like the angle of where they’re coming from. But the bottom line.. how do they sound? They sent me two cables to check out, the ‘Top Notch‘ and ‘Classic‘ cables. The ‘Top Notch’ is their boutique series cable, with Neutrik X-Series or C-Series 1/4″ plugs and using highly shielded, low capacitance cable. The ‘Classic’ uses standard plugs and and standard cord stock.

When it comes to instrument cables and the differences between them, I look for two basic items. Quality of the plugs, and if the signal is close to unaffected as possible. With lengths of cables, you will always encounter capacitance which will eat up your high end and create a ‘darker’ tone. It’s usually more evident the longer your go, and to test this, you need to run your guitar straight into the amp, without any buffering or additional pedals to affect the path.

Initially, I thought the cable sounded great, but the switching of cables on the fly seemed to have a psychological affect and the time to switch between would fuzzy the memory a bit. Thought it was time to call my good friend Jimmy Rolle to help with testing. I knew we could get a good recording of several cables, play a similar riff, play through the same amp.. same guitar and hear for ourselves. We had a total of three cables for this comparison. All clips were played with a Les Paul Elegant Custom Shop into a Matchless DC30.

Here were the cables involved (it has to be noted that the Cordinated was the shortest of the three, so it’s not a true apples to apples comparison):

– 15′ Top Notch Cordinated Cable
– 21′ DiMarzio Cable
– 21′ Colossal Cable

Cordinated Cable Clip

DiMarzio Cable Clip

Colossal Cable Clip

As you can hear the differences are subtle, and definitely held up to these other brands/builders. Now, we’re just talking about the tone/signal/quality of the cable, with Cordinated Cables you also get the ‘look’.  These cables are meticulously wrapped in colorful acrylic/wool yarns. They are all Scotch Guarded to help protect from staining. I have to return these cables, but I would have loved to do a few PBR beer spill tests and a practice or two with me stepping all over them to see how the held up.

There is a great selection of ‘wraps’ you can find on their Etsy site, which is their primary store site. You can also get custom wraps! If the wrap is not your thing, but like to get some high quality instrument cables, you can purchase ‘bare’ cables from them as well. So if you get a chance visit their various sites.. and let them know that EffectsBay.com sent ya!

ETSY: http://cordinated.etsy.com
TWITTER: http://twitter.com/cordinatedcable
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/cordinated
MAILING LIST: http://eepurl.com/fLEx