Blue Jeans Cable

08/19/2026

Digital audio cables -- principally S/PDIF but also TOSlink and AES/EBU -- have been a popular product of ours since we started up in 2002. If you have questions about digital audio cables, this new article on our site may help answer a few of those, and may dispel a myth or two along the way.

Discusses attributes of digital audio cables.

08/18/2026

We're pleased to see that a poll at Headphonesty has identified Blue Jeans Cable as one of the top 15 trusted names in hi-fi cable. What's more, the list also includes two of our principal suppliers -- Belden and Canare. The writeup notes our "more industrial approach" compared to other cable vendors, and that's accurate in more ways than one. Not ony do we source cable and parts from manufacturers who are well known in the commercial and industrial contexts, but we also assemble, right here in our Seattle shop, almost all of the finished products we sell. Some vendors are box-shifters; but every morning we fire up the gigantic air compressor in the basement and get to welding, crimping and soldering our way through the day's work.

Some of the most expensive names didn't even crack the top ten.

07/17/2026

We're seeing an increase in online posted content where people are using ChatGPT and similar services to answer questions about electronic wire and cable, and the answers people are getting from these chatbots are frequently way off the mark.

This wouldn't bother us too much, except that at times we find ourselves in e-mail or telephone conversations, arguing against a chatbot and having it referenced as an authoritative source on any number of subjects. The chatbots are not only frequently wrong; they are often very badly wrong.

In a world where "AI" is an increasing presence, we are old-school. We are actual human beings who physically handle, process, terminate and test wire and cable every day of every week. We study application issues surrounding wire and cable. We design cables and connectors and have them built to our specification for our use. We program, maintain and repair the wire-processing machines we use to strip, weld, cut and wind cable. We attend seminars and trade shows to learn about wire and cable. In short, while we are fallible like anyone, we actually do know a fair bit about this stuff. And when you call or e-mail our shop, you're not getting answers from somebody in customer service whose only connection to these things is from working in the same building where they are made. You're getting them from the very people who make the products we sell. We've never much liked the idea of having customer service reps who work from a script rather than from first-hand experience.

Our advice? Ignore the chatbots. If you have a question we are happy to answer it, and we have the technical and practical background to do it. But please don't ask us to engage in a debate with a chatbot.

03/19/2026

Blue Jeans Cable is hiring! We have a need for a full-time customer service rep/cable tech and for one or two part-time cable assemblers -- the latter being a great job for college students and the like, as we are very flexible on scheduling. PM us here if you live in the Seattle area and are interested in details...

12/30/2025

Good news for our Illinois customers: due to changes in state law, starting January 1, Blue Jeans Cable will no longer be obligated to collect Illinois sales tax. Sales through Amazon in IL will remain taxable, but sales through our website will not.

This is a topic about which a lot of customers -- not just in Illinois -- have asked, and about which there's been quite a bit of confusion. Blue Jeans Cable has essentially no physical presence anywhere in the USA other than Seattle, Washington -- so why do we charge sales tax in about twenty states?

Well, back in 2018, the US Supreme Court upset a long-standing precedent on the authority of states to impose sales tax on out-of-state vendors. For a long while, those taxes were unenforceable because a traditional reading of the Interstate Commerce clause of the US Constitution prohibited states from regulating commerce between the states, and that meant that practices of states which burdened interstate commerce were frequently -- not universally, but frequently -- unlawful. This included imposition of sales tax collection obligations on sellers who lacked a physical presence in the state to which the goods were shipped.

States didn't like this, of course. Theoretically the obligation to collect and remit the tax still existed, but was placed on the local buyer of goods -- but in practical terms that was seldom enforceable due to the states' lack of access to the relevant information and the small size of most such obligations. And states pushed, in a variety of ways, to open the floodgates. California was particularly aggressive on the point, and used to send letters to out of state vendors trying to bluff them into collecting taxes they had no obligation to collect.

But then came the Wayfair case before the US Supreme Court. It's a complicated subject and parts of the governing law remain unclear due to a rather nebulous decision, but in essence the Supreme Court held that a state could set reasonable thresholds for the tax-collection obligation upon out of state sellers, and that if those thresholds were indeed legally reasonable, those sellers could be obligated to collect and remit state sales taxes. Many states imposed such thresholds in the aftermath of Wayfair, often at the level of $100,000 in annual sales and/or 200 annual transactions. We meet thresholds in a variety of states, and additional wrinkles come into it as well -- many states contend (incorrectly, we believe, but who wants to litigate?) that the mere presence of inventory in a third party's hands (read: Amazon fulfillment warehouses) in the state constitutes a "physical presence" giving rise to sales tax nexus, even if the seller has no control over the location of that inventory or access to it other than the right to demand it be shipped back.

Who to blame? Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg, Alito and Gorsuch are responsible for the mess, while Breyer, Roberts, Sotomayor and Kagan dissented. The majority were persuaded by, among other things, self-serving amicus briefs by companies which sell sales tax compliance services; those companies assured the Court that sales tax compliance would be really easy and would cost next to nothing, "because software." Software which, conveniently, they sell at a price quite a bit higher than anything they suggested to the Court. Of course, actually implementing sales tax calculation and filing systems is a hideous mess, fraught with all manner of difficulty, and it is now a regular monthly ritual here, with BJC collecting and filing sales taxes in about twenty states. And that software? Well, we don't use it; it would be wrong, in our view, to reward the companies that aimed this particular bazooka at small business, and so we have had to build our own compliance systems.

Illinois, thank goodness, after being one of the most complicated states for sales tax compliance, has done something downright sensible. It eliminated the 200-transaction threshold (we were hitting that, but not the $100K threshold) and it clarified its stance on "physical presence" by declaring Amazon inventory, in most cases, irrelevant to physical presence. Illinois residents will still pay sales tax on a lot of out-of-state purchases, but as of January 1, not on purchases from our website.

If you don't live in Illinois but have the ear of a local legislator, this isn't a bad topic to raise. Sales tax compliance is relatively easy for huge companies with legions of accountants, but it's a real hardship for smaller businesses like ours. After Wayfair, it may be unreasonable to expect a state to give up the idea of collecting from very large vendors like Amazon, but lifting that burden from businesses of more modest size doesn't actually cost states that much (if anything at all -- on small accounts, administration can cost as much as the taxes that are collected).

09/30/2025

Most of our stock, of course, is composed of things people regularly want: RCA, XLR, HDMI, Ethernet and speaker cables of various sorts, particularly.

And then there are some odd bits which sell slowly, like s-video cable. Yes, people still want it. No, they don't want very much of it.

But here and there we have something that seems to have passed beyond human memory. Consider Belden 8281.

If you were building a television station, ages ago, you probably needed a great big shipment of 8281 to hook everything up. It's a 75 ohm video coax, used for routing video signals between devices around production facilities -- good for analog composite video, analog RGB signal types, and even for standard-def SDI. But we've had about 2000 feet of it in the "walrus room" down in our basement for a decade or more, and it's not apparently going anywhere any time soon.

8281: the cable time forgot. Why did something like this go from being so very, very common to being nearly non-existent? A few things.

First, it's big and stiff. It's an RG-59 cable, but you wouldn't know it to look at it, because it's significantly bigger than any modern RG-6. That's because it has a solid polyethylene dielectric; solid PE has a much higher dielectric constant than foamed PE (which, ceteris paribus, is a bad thing), but used to be de rigueur for high quality video cable because of the superb impedance consistency of solid-PE dielectric cable. Modern foamed PE is so good, though, that this is no longer an advantage.

Second, fire. The outer jacket of 8281 is polyethylene, just like the dielectric. After a few disastrous telephone-exchange fires decades ago, in which inhalation of fumes from burning PE caused serious medical problems for firefighters, electrical codes were updated to require less burnable jackets. Most similar cable today is jacketed in PVC; it's slower to burn (one cable company rep said to us one day that PE "burns like a candle") and that means slower fire spread and lower likelihood of large amounts of toxic fumes. Today, you can still use 8281, but you can't install it in walls or risers, so it's fairly useless as a facility cable.

So if you are a fancier of classic video gear, and are out there figuring out how to wire up your desk-sized Ampex 2-inch deck, give us a shout. We've still got the stuff. We're not entirely sure anyone else, anywhere, does.

09/25/2025

Back in 2014, after years of paying ever-increasing commercial rents in Seattle, we found a building to buy, and have been happily building cable assemblies here ever since. The building includes an underground concrete vault of sorts, on top of which we park our cars; when we first looked at the building it was still occupied by the former owner, who had boxes and boxes of animal bones, including quite a few walrus skulls, stored there. We therefore named it the "walrus room," and it is now where various odds and ends are kept -- and this beast, which we sometimes call the walrus, as it has a certain massiveness about it.

What is it? It's a Curtis air compressor, made in St. Louis, MO, and it's lived in this building for a good long while -- likely since about 1970 when our building was built.

It's handy that we do have that concrete vault, because, well, you don't want to be in the middle of a conversation next to this thing when it switches on. In our old shop, we also needed a lot of compressed air, but we used little compressors -- special quiet models made for dental offices -- so that the noise wouldn't drown out the telephones. But the vault gives us enough sound isolation from this thing that it can make all the noise it wants.

Coming as we did from law practice and IT work, we had no idea how useful compressed air was until we got into the cable business. All we knew it was good for was to enable auto mechanics to over-torque lug nuts so that you can't change a flat by the side of the road unless you happen to have Hercules riding shotgun. But pneumatic tools are all over the shop; our crimp presses all run on compressed air, and the ultrasonic welders use it, too -- in order to get a good weld you've got to compress and immobilize the material being welded. And then there are odd and surprising bits -- our Schleuniger cable coiler, used for coiling up long cables when they come out of a measure-and-cut machine, also does most of its work with compressed air. We do also have an air wrench, in case we want to disassemble a spool or reminisce about the tightest a mechanic has ever over-torqued our lug nuts (that would be on the Studebaker, where a young whippersnapper had no idea what the letter "L" in the middle of the lug means, and so could not figure out why the things wouldn't turn. Didn't know you could strip the threads clean off of the lugs with enough air-wrench, but it turns out you can!)

If you have any of our LC-1 or LC-2 audio cables, or our ultrasonically-welded speaker cables, chances are that the "walrus" was the muscle that helped put them together. But it comes in handy for something else, too. Every time someone tells us that manufacturing in America is dead, we walk into the walrus room, fire up the Curtis walrus, and then, you know what? We can't hear them any longer. This bu**er is loud.

08/25/2025

We were delighted to see a favorable mention in this month's issue of The Absolute Sound for our Ethernet cables. As Absolute Sound readers are often shopping at prices which are stratospheric compared to ours, we do hope that some of them find some real value in the down-to-earth nature of what we do. (Or, perhaps, since the author of the piece recommended an unshielded rather than a shielded Ethernet cable, the not-so-down-to-earth nature of what we do.)

Music streaming is of course huge today; one can't go to an audio show without being presented with a dizzying assortment of DACs and related gear. And while some people's wi-fi networks are fast and stable, there's still nothing like a wired connection made with a spec-compliant Ethernet cable to get data from point to point without a fuss.

We first became involved in Ethernet cable some years ago when, after hearing it said that 80% of patch cords on the market failed their stated specifications, we decided to check that out ourselves. And in testing cables from an assortment of the most popular online retailers, that's exactly what we found: 16 of 20 cables we tested failed their stated Cat 6 or Cat 6A specs, and about half also failed the much easier Cat 5e specification.

The frequent saying on this is, of course, that it is only ones and zeros. In Ethernet protocols that's literally not true, because all popular Ethernet protocols actually use multilevel encoding with more voltage levels than "one" and "zero" in order to keep the signal bandwidth down. But worse than that is the fact that "digital" signals in the real world are annoyingly analog-like. We all know a one from a zero, and we can tell on from off, and so if we learn a bit of radio morse, we can listen to a string of code and render it as letters. But imagine that the "on" is not fully on, nor the "off" fully off, and that the timing may sometimes be a bit out of whack -- that's what return loss and crosstalk do to signals in Ethernet cables, and it makes the receiving circuit's job harder.

Note that we said "harder," not necessarily "difficult." At low levels of RL and crosstalk, it's pretty clear what the signal content is and if that's the case, all is well. If that's not the case, and the levels of loss DO make the task difficult, you start getting dropped packets, and that's where the world of streaming gets to be a bit different from the world of e-mail or web access. Why? It's all about latency.

If we e-mail you a price quote, and you go to read that quote, your computer has to get the e-mail from the server. Do you know whether it got through correctly the first time, or whether it suffered packet loss on the way? No, and the reason you don't is that unless data losses are really severe, you'd never notice the difference. What difference does it make whether the quote shows up in one second, or in one hundredth of a second? Applications like that are very forgiving -- the network can be performing pretty badly, but if the network isn't clogged up with traffic and the losses aren't really severe, it's entirely likely that nobody will notice when pushing files or correspondence around.

But streaming applications involve a time element which typical e-mail correspondence does not. If video or audio transmission suffers some packet loss, the re-sent data had better get there in time to correctly reproduce the stream, or there will be a hiccup -- so the receiving device needs to let the sender know, and the sender needs to resend in time. If it doesn't, depending on the specific applications used, this might show up a variety of ways: the dreaded "buffering" message, or intermittent stops, starts or pops being the most likely.

Now, we see "audiophile" Ethernet cables being promoted here and there for thousands of dollars. We don't see the point of that at all. Once reception of the signal is already good enough for it to be reproduced accurately and on time, there's really no room left for improvement. Some of those cables certainly LOOK fancy. They often have snazzier-looking connectors, though our own experience has been that snazzy-looking Ethernet connectors generally perform no better (and sometimes worse!) than their more pedestrian counterparts.

Might a two-dollar Ethernet cable be doing everything it needs to do for your streaming? It certainly might. We would be fools to say otherwise. But we also know that when we test those cables against the industry-standard TIA and ISO specifications, a lot of them fail; whether that leads to degradation in any particular application will depend on how bad the cable is, and upon other factors beyond wire and cable performance. And, please note: the TIA and ISO specifications are performance specs, based upon sophisticated electronic testing, not simple physical specs along the lines of "extrude this much insulation over this many wires and twist like so." You can't look at a cable and know whether it is compliant -- and that's true even if you know that the bulk cable and the connectors used are all compliant.

We'd never recommend buying a thousand-dollar Ethernet cable. But there definitely are places, especially in audio and video streaming, where a cable that costs less than twenty bucks will outperform that two-dollar cable, and where that better performance will actually matter. If you may be in that place, well, we've got the stuff. Every Ethernet cable we sell is tested on a certification tester (note: not a mere "qualification tester"), and is tested against the applicable patch cord standard (note: not the much easier, and inapplicable, "channel" standard). If it doesn't pass, we won't ship it.

07/31/2025

New Ethernet cables at BJC:

We've been known for quality Ethernet cables for a number of years. In a market where 80% of cables sold at retail fail to meet the specifications for their designated category, we test every last one of our Ethernet cables, whether Cat 5e, 6 or 6A, on a certification tester to ensure spec compliance. And yes, that's a certification tester, not a qualification tester; we are testing against the patch cord standard, not against the commonly-tested, inapplicable, and much easier channel standard.

For years now, all of our Ethernet patch cord stocks have been made by Belden. Today we are adding a new line of Cat 6 and 6A cables using cable stock made in Ware, Massachusetts by Quabbin Wire & Cable, a company known for its high quality and consistency of manufacture. As always, though we don't make the bulk cable ourselves, the cable is terminated and tested here in our Seattle shop, using Sentinel connectors from York, Pennsylvania.

The Quabbin 6A cable we've added is spec-compliant whether the shield is grounded or not; accordingly, we are now able to offer 6A patch cords either in shielded or unshielded configuration. Which to choose? It's pretty simple: if the rest of your network is unshielded, best to stay unshielded; but if if it's shielded, then shielded patchcords are the best choice.

We like to offer our cables in as many colors as possible (ideally, all ten resistor-code colors), but at the moment we are sort of in Henry Ford territory; you can have the 6A in any color you want, so long as it's blue. But we will be adding more colors over the coming months.

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