ANALYSIS PLUS CABLES

1) DARK CHOCOLATE OVAL WITH GOLD PLUG

This is a com­pletely green cable (eth­i­cally, not in colour). Even the cat­a­log and paper are made in the USA, which is pretty dang rare these days. The cable includes 20 gauge con­duc­tors, a con­duc­tive sheath to elim­i­nate micro­phon­ics and an oval cen­ter con­duc­tor with a hol­low oval return. It’s avail­able with straight or 90 degree mono plugs. The plugs them­selves seem to be very high qual­ity indeed. It’s one of those things, right? You get so used to cables that have lit­tle creaks and wob­bles in the cas­ing that you don’t even notice it’s a prob­lem until you pick up a nicer cable like this, and then you realise what you’re missing.

2) BLACK OVAL STRAIGHT TO STRAIGHT — SILENT

The Black Oval instru­ment cable has silent 1/4″ plugs  — one straight, one angled — which let you switch instru­ments with­out those hideous crack­ing, pop­ping and fzzzt­ing sounds. The silent plug is a spe­cial ver­sion twin-pole mono plug with an inte­grated switch that auto­mat­i­cally shorts the cable when it’s unplugged thanks to a spring-loaded ground sleeve. The cable itself has 20 gauge con­duc­tors, a con­duc­tive sheath to elim­i­nate micro­phon­ics, and an oval cen­ter con­duc­tor with a hol­low oval return.

3) YELLOW OVAL

Analy­sis Plus uses the most flex­i­ble outer jacket avail­able, Sil­i­con Rub­ber, to cre­ate a more flex­i­ble ver­sion of the Yel­low Oval cable. The con­duc­tors are low loss 18 gauge oxy­gen free cop­per woven in a patented oval design. As the com­pany says of this cable, “It is a bal­anced design (not coax­ial like oth­ers) and the best dielec­tric — Teflon for proven improve­ment. To get max­i­mum per­for­mance you wouldn’t put bicy­cle tires on a Fer­rari — the same is true for your gui­tar and amp. If you can’t hear the dif­fer­ence you don’t need one!”

PLAY TEST

Each of these cables sounds spec­tac­u­lar. In fact it’s been said many times that Analy­sis Plus cables are ‘ruth­lessly hon­est’ and that’s a great way to put it. If you hide behind dis­tor­tion and com­pres­sion you’re prob­a­bly not aware of just how much of your tone you’re miss­ing. Using any of these cables with my Stra­to­caster with low-output sin­gle coil pick­ups, I could hear every wind of the string, every dirty fret. Switch­ing to the hot hum­buck­ers in my Les Paul I could hear more punch and har­monic con­tent. Some play­ers will thrive on this enhanced detail while oth­ers might feel a lit­tle bit naked because of it.

A-CORD-INGLY…

Each of these cables has their charms and uses. The Yel­low Oval is a great stage cable because it’s so tangle-free and noise-free. The Black Oval’s silent plug makes it a no-brainer for those who need to change instru­ments a few times dur­ing a show and the Dark Choco­late is just a high-quality, great-sounding, low-noise cable. It all depends on what you need in your par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion, but whichever one you go for, you’ll be get­ting a very high-quality, low-noise cable that will last.