The Behringer CT100 cable tester is designed and built for one express purpose, testing your cables. How often have you experienced signal problems and wasted time checking equipment is plugged in, phantom power is turned on and performed all the other idiot checks, only to discover your cable is broken?
Wouldn’t it be so much better if you could arrive at a gig knowing your cables are in good working order before laying out those 20-30 metre runs of XLR, carefully routing them between and under all manner of other equipment? Valuable time could be saved if you weren’t having to redo all this work.
Cables have a rough time, people don’t always give them the care they deserve. Failing to coil them correctly, dumping them in cases, pulling and tugging on them when they get caught and my personal hate, rolling heavy flight cases across them! It’s no wonder that cables end up damaged, and that damage isn’t always visible.
Using the cable tester is a simple, quick and efficient way of checking your cables work first. Simply switch on the device, which is roughly the same size as a DI box. Plug both ends of the cable into it and check the LEDs on the front are showing the pins are correctly aligned.
The CT100 cable tester can cope with all manner of different cable types including XLR, mono and stereo 1/4″, 1/8″ jacks, TT, RCA and MIDI connectors. If your cable isn’t catered for here, then you could use an adaptor (as long as you are sure the adaptor isn’t faulty!).
The tester is capable of more than this one simple operation though. It will perform continuity tests, detect intermittent connections, detect the presence of phantom power and detect a grounded shield. It can also generate a test tone between 1kHz and 400 Hz on the “+ pin” of all the out jacks. Because the device uses tones for testing it means you can pass it through other equipment and even across several links if you want to check a whole chain.
Finally, the cable tester can even test your cables when you can’t plug both ends into the device at the same time. Ideal for checking your multi-core runs, or permanently installed cables!
The device works very well, it’s made with a strong metal case so it should survive knocks and drops and general abuse. It has LEDs on the front of the device which show you which pins are wired to what. It also stores failures so you don’t have to keep a constant eye on the LEDs, very useful for intermittent faults! I tested it on numerous cables both known to be good, and a couple with known faults. It even picked up an intermittent fault on one of my cables I believed to be fine! It identified every cable that had a fault, telling me on which pin the problem was located.
The CT100 can be picked up for around £20-£25 and in my opinion is a necessity. I will make sure the CT100 remains in my kit bag for a long time to come!
Larry says
The instructions that come with this device are bleak, & don’t indicate what the led’s (lights) are supposed to look like when a cable is good, versus when a cable is bad. Also, every time you plug in the OUT plug, all the Intermittent lights come on — the vertical row on the far left side. Hitting Reset, those lights disappear. What is a “good” light set supposed to look like for a Balanced cord and an Unbalanced cord? And what is the light config. for phone, versus RCA, & the different types? I see there’s a difference, but the whole thing is confusing to me. And what is a ‘bad” light set supposed to look like for Bal. & Unbal? A simple chart of what the lights are supposed to look like would help. Can anyone out there help?
Zachary Willhite says
The Behringer CT100 is a cheap copy of the Ebtech Swizz Army Tester. Here’s a link to what lights are suppose to light up when the cable is good: http://www.ebtechaudio.com/swizzman.pdf
asok14215 says
@Zachary, you da man. Thanks for the link.