cheap splitter cables are the devil

[olds1959special]

don't use these

instead, use these

 

[Doodski]

Hehe. Too funny. You nail'd it right on the noggin. I retailed gear for ~9 years before I returned to study and became a electronic tech. Anyway... In that 9 years I worked a huge chain of AV stores owned by a determined old Euro guy that started by opening a little boutique store selling Dual stereos in the 1950s on a very busy downtown street in a major city and was a pioneer of the industry. He gave me his personal promise and guarantee to my face with a firm handshake that if I worked hard I would make very good money and he would support the commission pay structure and pay my large cheques in full. He did that and was a great example for me to see what a good guy can be and what we can do on just a handshake. I also worked mom and pop stores where we sold and serviced gear and bought all the stuff we needed over the phone and over dinners with reps and stuff like that. So... At the mom and pop stores we all day everyday had traffic flow for all the little dollar or two accessories and back then we never had blister packs etc. We had huge rolls of speaker wire, large boxes filled with TV coax cable splitters , large boxes of RCA splitters and all that stuff we bought in bulk to get good prices on them otherwise we got very poor prices and could not bring in the customers. and.... Those RCA splitters and cable TV coax splitters sometimes where the worst for failures. We actually had entire large boxes full of them with so many defectives that we tossed the entire boxes full of them into the garbage because it was more profitable to toss them all in the garbage and buy another big box of them than sell them and deal with so many customer service issues. I remember we even had several rolls of speaker wire that was shorted between the positive and negative wires in various spots along the length of the roll and caused a couple of amps to fry and we where totally shocked when we traced the source of the issue to the rolls of speaker wire that where defective from the factory and we tossed all of them in the garbage. This sort of stuff was just a cost of doing business at the time and we where always on the lookout for suspect sources of product etc.