Description
When someone asks us which XLR to buy for the stage, this is the one we point at. The 2549 has been the default mic cable in professional audio for long enough that most engineers have stopped thinking about it, which is about the highest compliment a cable can get. It gets coiled, stepped on, thrown in a case and pulled out again, and it keeps working.
A twisted pair of 22AWG Neglex oxygen-free copper conductors sits inside a served shield with 100% coverage. Twisting the pair is what makes a balanced line reject interference — both conductors pick up the same noise, and the preamp cancels it at the far end. The full-coverage shield handles what’s left. Between them, this is a cable you can run past a lighting bar without hearing about it.
The conductor insulation is cross-linked polyethylene, which matters more than it sounds — XLPE doesn’t shrink back from the heat of a soldering iron, so the joint inside the connector stays exactly as it was built. The jacket is 0.236″ (6mm) of smooth PVC that stays supple in the cold and doesn’t go chalky after a few seasons.
Terminated with black Neutrik XX connectors and gold contacts, in XLR or TRS, hand-soldered with lead-free ROHS-compliant silver solder, built to order and tested before it ships. Backed by our lifetime warranty.
For fixed runs that get set once and left — wall boxes, patch bays, the back of a rack — the Van Damme Tour Grade Classic XKE is the one we’d reach for. Cotton fillers hold the pair in a fixed geometry, so it stays consistent along the whole run.
