TRISTAN JAMES: I am Tristan James. I work as an engineer and a music producer for an independent label called Proletariat Productions. We try to give opportunities to independent artists who mostly do kind of political, progressive, or radical work with their music.

We used Mogami cabling for most of the studio. Good 85% of the cabling in this studio is made by Mogami.

[CABLE TEST RECAP PLAYING]

[SPEAKING THROUGH MIC WITH GENERIC CABLE] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

[SPEAKING THROUGH MIC WITH MOGAMI QUAD CABLE] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

[SPEAKING THROUGH MIC WITH GENERIC CABLE] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

[SPEAKING THROUGH MIC WITH MOGAMI QUAD CABLE] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

What I usually hear in the comparison between the two is a lot more high end in the cable. The difference in the cable, I’m hearing a lot more high end frequency response, less noise floor, and I get the perception of more dynamic -- more sensitivity to dynamics in my voice there, and now the difference is extremely subtle but it’s enough that that it’s worth it to me, not only for the fidelity but I will show you what it’s like to actually work with different cables when you’re building them, why there is a difference.

So yeah. Now I’m talking on a Lav now so you’re going to definitely hear a difference in sound, but just to give you an example of what I’m talking about, when you’re soldering a few hundred connections at a time, there is -- like for example wall panel I’ve got 32 jacks on our wall panel which each jack is balanced so it’s three connections per jack, so you can do the math. That’s a lot of connections to do at one time. If you use something like a Mogami Cable, it’s very easy to strip the cable.

So, you can see here this is extremely high-quality copper which adds to the cost of it a little bit. You’ve also got four leads in there, two of the clear and two blue. Oh, I’m sorry. This is a single one, but okay. I’m sorry. But what you’re hearing with the microphone was Quad in which there’s two blue leads and two clear leads. They’re twisted pairs inside so you’ve got actually four twisted pairs and what that does is it sort of creates a magnetic field at that it reduces interference, and that’s part of the kind of voodoo conspiracy that people say about Mogami is like it doesn’t really work. Well, I definitely find that there is a difference with the twisted pairs.

Another difference, yeah, there’s the quality of the copper is significantly different. You can feel it and it’s even visually different. With the way it’s wrapped, it’s wrapped. I’ve kind of destroyed it now but it’s wrapped very solidly around and not braided. Here’s an example of a braided shield which when you bend a braided shield it opens up gaps in the braid which can also pickup radio interference. This is actually kind of important based on where we are in Chicago where there is zero frequency space in the air, so you’re talking I mean if there is wave or a radio wave out there, it is here. So, that’s important for studios in heavy metropolitan environments to be able to get rid of radio noise in their signal. Otherwise, you’re basically all your mic cables are basically worth serving as an antenna.

So yeah, and then this is -- Yeah, that’s Canary which is a competitor of Mogami but is again braided shield. It’s got the Quad that I was talking about. There are four leads, they’re twisted pair which is the same concept that our test Mogami microphone was using but in this case we’ve got braided shield and a bunch of stuff stuffed in here, cloth, whatever insulation which is a total pain to deal with when you’re dealing with a lot of connections, and you have to kind of sort it out, trim it up, and then solder it on and it’s a total pain to me, so in half the time I can connect the Mogami stuff and it sounds good and lasts a really long time and so that’s why we use them.