DIY patch cable sources?

I am interested in making my own 1/4" and maybe even 3.5mm patch cables. The jack plugs themselves are fairly straightforward to find. The cable, however, is something I don’t know how to search for yet. I’d be interested in buying a reel of cable so I can cut to size/etc. Ideally, I’d like to find a cable with a yellow jacket. Do you have any recommendations or search terms to use?

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for 1/4" cable I generally just search for ‘instrument cable’ and that usually works grand. There’s lots of places out there which provide cabling for making guitar leads and that so I imagine yellow shouldn’t be too hard to find. Where are you based?

EDIT: Oh, and Sommer is the brand I’ve most usually come across and I’ve always been happy with it

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I’ve had some success with speaker cable, which is very cheap and easy to work with. I have adopted a monopolar (banana plug) connection methodology so I split the cores and get twice the length of cable, but for Kosmo or Eurorack just keep the cores together. The thickness is good and conductance is fine.

See here for an example.

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Most speaker cable is probably too thick for 3.5mm at least. I’d personally do coax/shielded or twisted pair wires. Especially for longer lengths.

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Yes I think you’re probably right about the thickness. It works out okay with 4mm banana plugs but that’s single core.

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Markertek Supply , all wire needs and such is one way ,

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so I will report back after I receive it - but I need to make both Mono and Stereo cables -
I was looking at cable spools and holy shit theyre expensive for this size cable.
I bought one of these 50’ Balance XLR Mic Cables for 15 bucks, and figured I can cut it down to the sizes I need since I just got a bunch of 1/4" plugs. lol

I’ll let yall know how it goes.

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Works excellent!

So it’s a balanced cable, if you needed to make stereo cables you can use the copper sleeve inside as ground and use the white wire for left and the red wire for right. :slight_smile:
For mono - use the red wire for tip and the white wire for ground and clip the copper sleeve away.

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Are you sure of that? It seems to me that having a floating shield isn’t a great idea.

It doesn’t touch anything, and I do not seeing anything advising against it.
Shield, cotton shield, and 2 coated wires.

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So I read a bit about it, and indeed it seems to do nothing. But it will not act as a shield either. My choice for unbalanced signals still would be to ground the shield and use only one central connector.