I had a 3-pin XLR cable go bad on me at a recent gig and cease passing DMX, easily diagnosed by running down the line with my cool little terminator with the LED in the back. Now, I'll be the first to agree that using ordinary mic cable for DMX is a bozo no-no since the characteristic impedance is probably nowhere near 100 ohms, but hey, that is what's available and over our short distances, it works fine. Anyway, I took it apart this morning, and uncovered the lurking horror. Seems there's a Neutrik variant that uses insulation-displacement connectors [IDC] as opposed to solder-cup -- the type where a bit of metal with a narrow Y-shaped slit in it is supposed to slice through a wire's insulation around the conductor, squish the conductor slightly and make firm contact, and then never move again. Probably sold as a "solderless, easy crimp" type of thing. As these heads came apart, there wasn't even any *pretense* that the inner wires were attached anymore -- they just fell away, broken. And it's not even clear how the shield is supposed to attach to anything at all -- it just sort of lays up against a lug connected to pin 1. This is an astoundingly ill-intentioned idea. IDC is fine for things like patch panels, where there are thousands of connections that must be made quickly and they are never going to be moved around. But here they're trying to use it on a professional signal cable, which has to be one of the most abused pieces of gear in the known touring universe, and they expect IDC to hold up to this?! What brand of crack *are* they smoking, anyways? Granted, Neutrik's strain-relief mechanisms are some of the best, but even that can't get around the fact that electrical connections frequently get pulled on in this environment. How many connector shells have *you* had to whip out pliers and bend back into some approximation of round again before you could plug it in? Now I have to go back through *all* the rest of the cables and make sure that this idiocy is forever purged from our lives. _H* === various anonymized replies === So, write Kathy at Neutrik and tell her. Personally, I think these are a really stupid idea but not as stupid as their 1/4" plugs that don't have a real ground and just press the shield up against the shell of the plug. It works fine, for a while. Then it doesn't. ... Kathy is the customer relations person at Neutrik USA. Call Neutrik on the phone, ask for her, and tell her I sent you. ===== Well. there are an awful lot of XLR cables used in studio applications where they need to make thousands of connections and the connector is probably not going to be touched until the studio is ripped out. But based on your description, using it in a normal mic cable is bad. Does sound like something handy to keep in the gig bag for emergency mic cable repairs though. ===== Feh! Keep some real connectors in your kit, and a couple of soldering irons with them (personally I keep a butane and a plug in), and just fix it right, only takes a few seconds. Far more time is taken in finding the problem. You see, there's this little know problem, wherein, once a quick fix is applied in the field, a large percentage of the time, no one ever goes back and does a real repair on it. In truth, when dealing with mic cables, my normal reaction is to clip the head off, toss it into the 'I'll get to it pile' and grab another good cable. Oh yea, when I worked in both an audio multitrack and a video studio, the only XLR connctors which weren't routinely disurbed were those buried in wall plates. We were always replacing this bit or gear or that, and in order to get to one piece we often had to unpatch/repatch huge amounts of jumpers. Made me happy I've was even more label happy in my twenties.