Hicon HI-J63MA05 Angled Jack

Appearance: nice black finish and gold tip (which probably hurts nothing). Pancake because it looks as though someone has whacked it with a hammer. Low profile and wide. Probably one of the lowest profile solderable riight-angled jack plugs going.

Mechanics: Held together with 2 small screws on the wide part of the flanges. Nothing has stripped or come apart yet, I guess adding Locktite wouldn’t hurt any. Probably the tensioning on the clamped cable keeps the screws tight.

Soldering: The centre lug fits a Sommer XXL coax core well. I’ve never been able to get the screen through the hole in the ground lug. Too tight. I’ve always soldered to the lug but to do this I have bent the lug up a little, away from the housing to minimize the soldering iron heat conducted away. I’ve made many connections but only screwed up one so that I had to re do it.

Instructions: What instructions? Where? No worries, you can work it out.

Cable clamping: Seems to grip a Sommer XXL with 6,8mm diameter well. But I’m not sure how it would do with thinner cables. I tried to measure the inside diameter with vernier calipers when clamped and got ca. 5,7mm. Would any cable thinner than this be clamped at all?. In that case I’d add a short length of shrink wrap to the cable, to thicken it and get a good clamp.

Reliability: Too early to say. The clamping section is quite short so I would expect some movement to be transferred to the solder joints, possibly weakening them with time, (and possibly requiring a resolder). This is the reason I’d never use these Hicon pancakes for an instrument cable. Others have remarked that they are too wide for a stratty thing anyway . But for immobile patch cables on a fixed board these should remain good for a long time.

So?: I like them warts ‘n all. Reasonably priced. But at my place you’ll only ever find them on a pedalboard where socket spacing allows. Horses for courses. Recommended and especially for wider cables.

This is based on the Switchcraft 228 'Pancake' plug but has the benefit of a solder tab for the ground connection - the Switchcraft requires the shell to be soldered. The insulation material exhibits a good degree of heat resistance and under magnification appears to be epoxy-glass laminate similar to PCB material. Heat resistance is an important point when soldering to maintain the integrity of the riveted construction. Many low-cost connectors ignore this point and this can be a cause of the assembly loosening later on in life.

Dimensionally there isn't much difference between the Hicon and Switchcraft, though the Hicon uses a slightly thinner material for the shell and the barrel isn't as well shaped where it's swaged over inside the shell. For pedalboad use this isn't an important point and neither the terminals nor barrel could be moved even under considerable pressure.

I was initially apprehensive over whether the black cover (powder coated steel) would make ground contact with the mating half when screwed together. Tests on a number of finally-assembled connectors shows that they do connect to ground which is important in reducing noise.

The only issue I had was for some reason the 'hot' terminal on every plug had a coating which made it difficult to solder until cleaned. The ground terminal was fine. This was the case for each one of 30 connectors I bought, though it wouldn't deter me from buying this product again.

Overall they're pretty well made and enable close-spacing of pedals in a tight setup. ?they look good, too.

Ordered some of these connectors to make myself some low-profile patch connectors for my latest pedalboard. I wanted to minimise the distance between adjacent pedals and so these "pancake" style connectors seemed perfect.

First off, although these connectors are cheap they are very good quality. Solidly built, decent quality metal that is well cast and has no sharp edges.

Opening them up, they have two solder tabs, one for the signal and one for the shield. On some connectors the shield just gets soldered to bare metal so having a dedicated solder tab really helps make the job easier.

There is also a little plastic "guard" inside the connector that prevents the signal from earthing on the edge of the case. This is a nice touch and hopefully will prevent any cables from being intermittent!

I used Sommer Spirit XXL cable and made myself four cables. I'd never done this before but it was really very straightforward, took about ten minutes a cable so I'd imagine that with practice you could get a lot quicker. All of them worked first time (thanks to the easy two-tab design of these connectors) and they sound really good.

If you want the "too long, didn't read" version then: good connectors, well designed, easy to use, sound good.