maybe to ... silkpantscables?
You know, the problem with any trade name is that after you use it for a few years, it always seems contrived and embarrassing...
On the subject, though, of more "audiophile"-ish looking cable: we have thought about this a bit, and always it comes back to a few basics. Building cable assemblies with a lot of nylon sleeving and shrink tube and that sort of thing winds up involving a rather surprising amount of added labor. That's especially so when one takes into account the fact that the people who particularly want a product like that are relatively picky about exactly how it looks, so it really needs to be done with considerable attention to detail to be a success. When people ask us to do this sort of thing, and we custom-quote it, they often are surprised at how much it adds to the price, and more often than not they realize they don't really want to pay for it.
Also, if we offer a higher-priced, dressed-up version of a product, inevitably it leads to the assumption, on the part of many of our customers, that we must be saying there is something "better" about the high-priced version. This makes people uneasy in ordering the basic version, which is of course the version we actually recommend that people buy. They then write to us and ask: "why is this better, and why does it cost so much?", and we have to write back and say, "it's not better, but some people prefer it because it looks nicer," which often leads to a strange conversation with a customer who is rendered completely incredulous by the assertion that somebody would pay double the price for the same product in techflex and shrink tubing, with no improvement in performance. It leads to sales confusion, and, in the odd world of marketing, as often as not that means a lost sale.
We used to have this problem with Belden 89259, a cable which is frequently touted on "audiophile" sites as the best coax for analog audio. People would write to us and ask, in essence, "since this is the most expensive cable you sell, it must be the best. Why is it better than your standard cable?" and we would have to explain that we liked our standard cable better than the one that cost several times as much, but that we offer the expensive stuff because there's a dedicated group of people out there who prefer it. This conversation happened so often, and led to so much confusion, that we had to de-emphasize 89259 and other "special-demand" cables on our site just to stem the tide of customer support inquiries.
My own take on this whole issue of fancy sleeving, et cetera, has always been that techflex is an extraordinary dust magnet (just look at some techflex-sleeved cables that have been behind a typical equipment rack for a year!) and that heatshrink sleeving looks much better in photos than in real life and is prone to working its way loose with handling--so those materials are better avoided when possible. Since they really add no function (except when techflex is used to bundle cables together), we avoid them.
And going back to that trade name: one of the notions behind "Blue Jeans Cable" as our name (when my wife and I selected that name some years ago) was to signify the elevation of function over form. Cables go behind the rack, not in front, and in our view, what's important is that they function well rather than look good. We also wanted, to the maximum extent possible, to keep the assembly in the USA, and that calls, implicitly, for keeping labor cost per unit down; it means, for example, that one is better off using an expensive and well-engineered connector with a short assembly time than using a cheap connector (I could buy solder-on RCAs for 25 cents in China!) with a comparatively long assembly time, and that one is better off letting the cable jacket be the product exterior than dressing it up with sleeving (which also has the downside of negating the cable's installation rating).
So, while it's always possible that we might introduce something in the way of a "dressier" product, it's not likely in the near term. We are always trying to keep costs and prices down, and to keep to our core concept, which is to stress value for money rather than panache. But if enough people want panache, someday we might try to do that, too...
Kurt
Blue Jeans Cable
