Extremely sorry to hear about your losses. My deepest condolences.
I've recently "discovered" (with help from some guys around here...
) the mogami cable 'family', and so far have found it excellent sonically.
Their microphone cable uses a thick spiral-wrapped (not braided) bunch of shielding wire that is very easy to connect; no need for a drain wire, since almost every strand of the insulation acts as part of a huge stranded drain wire!
The reasoning behind the spiral approach is that it retains higher coverage than a braid, when the cable is flexed (which pulls braided strands apart, creating little gaps between them). Having experimented and watched under magnification what happens with both types, I'm inclined to believe it! Some of their coaxial cable has a conductive layer underneath the wire shielding, as well.
Quite affordable for the quality; at least as good as Belden equivalents, and a little easier to work with. At some stage I'll arrange a double-blind A/B comparison with the two brands, but at this stage my feeling is the Mogami might have the edge. That is coming from a long-time Belden user. This stuff sounds similar to the Japanese 99.99998% continuous-crystal OFC stuff, at small percentage of the cost. Some of that may have to do with the winding pattern inside the quad cable(?). Nothing overly extravagant about these, just all the important details done well. I'm just pleased enough with the initial results from just two interconnects, that I'm going to try doing an entire audio chain (including speaker wire) from Mogami, next.
