Hey y'all!
Updating my home studio with some new cables. And of course that means a lot of new 1/4" jacks! I have normally used Neutrik jacks for one simple reason - they have coding rings for easy identification. I am, however, not happy with the fact that the ground connection has to be tack soldered. For that reason, I would love to switch over Amphenol ACPS plugs as they have an actual lug for the ground connection, but what's stopping me is the lack of colour coding for such connectors. I know I could just wrap some electrical tape over the thing, or use heat shrink, but former has is quite literally tacky and the latter has limited colour options and visibility in the installation.
Does anyone know of good coding options for Amphenol plugs or other alternatives like Hicon?
Thanks!
Updating my home studio with some new cables. And of course that means a lot of new 1/4" jacks! I have normally used Neutrik jacks for one simple reason - they have coding rings for easy identification. I am, however, not happy with the fact that the ground connection has to be tack soldered. For that reason, I would love to switch over Amphenol ACPS plugs as they have an actual lug for the ground connection, but what's stopping me is the lack of colour coding for such connectors. I know I could just wrap some electrical tape over the thing, or use heat shrink, but former has is quite literally tacky and the latter has limited colour options and visibility in the installation.
Does anyone know of good coding options for Amphenol plugs or other alternatives like Hicon?
Thanks!
I know you aren't thrilled with the use of heatshrink tubing, but that's what I use on all my interconnects. I put the shrink tubing on the cable immediately behind the connector, on both ends. I've used white, black, yellow, red, and blue shrink tubing. When that's not enough colors to keep everything organized, I've also used two pieces of different colored shrink tubing on some cables. For example, you could use yellow to identify the set of cables from your tuner, and then further color-code them with red/black (or other colors) to identify right and left channels. Sometimes I'll use a wider piece of the base color (yellow in this example), and then a narrow piece of a second color (black or red) applied on top of the base color, effectively creating a two-color band on the cable. I have a lot of components in my system (including two tape decks with both in and out), and I have yet to run out of possible color combinations. I keep a chart handy listing the color assignments to aid in future cable-wrangling. Going on 25+ years of using this method of cable identification.
Thanks for your response! The doubling up of heat-shrink didn't occur to me lol. That's a pretty good solution! I might try that haha.
Okay, I think I found something for Amphenol plugs - product group AC-NUT for the shell and AC_GROMMET for the cable relief. I THINK these are good for the AC** 1/4" plugs, but a lot of the pricing for the the AC-NUT products sucks and they seem to have low availability, and there doesn't seem to be good info out for either.
