Hicon HI-J63MA05 Angled Jack

I've got 20 plugs for making pedalboard patch cables. Have used them in conjunction with a Sommer Tricone MkII cable - this pair fits together pretty well.

+++ Pros:
I'm not very good at soldering, but these plugs were the easiest to deal with in my experience. Both tip and sleeve have individual plates for soldering - they haven't required any additional cleaning, so tin was applied pretty easily.

These pancakes fully reveal their "compact" potential being used in a single row of tightly-spaced pedals with side-mounted inputs. But with pedals, that have a close-placed inputs-outputs, the width of pancake most likely will lead to a problems.

--- Cons:
The quality of the ring part makes me doubt in its sturdiness - seems like it made out of ceramic or epoxy resin material, that tends to crumble when exposed. It has tiny pores in it, that don't adds a confidence in a reliability of the whole plug. On the other hand, it could provide more heat-resistance, comparing with a regular plastic rings - but I've never faced such a problem.

Furthermore, the overall quality of the plugs differs from each other - it concerns the straight of the sleeve and tip, particularly. One of the plugs has so much scewed tip, that I just can't insert it in the pedal's socket, another one had so tight motion, that I was afraid of brokening of a pedal's jack input. So I had to refuse the idea of using both of them. The rest of these plugs have similar problem, but in a minor degree, so it doesn't prevent from using them.

=== Total
All in all, I would recommend these plugs only for using in a tight-spaced pedalboards. But if you have the opportunity - look at something more sturdy and consistent.

I bought to replace the larger right-angled jacks on my pedal board. These seem OK for the task. The pancake section is 34 mm long (shorter than most right angled jacks), and just 12 mm thick above the base of the jack shaft, which makes then just 2 or 3 mm thinner than the right angled jacks I was using before. It might not seem like much but it does count and does help on a crowded pedal board. However, there are problems...

1) The pancake section is 20 mm wide and therefore protrudes 10 mm from the centre line of the jack plug itself. That means that you cannot use two of these side-by-side unless both sockets you plug into are at least 20 mm apart. Alas, the stereo inputs on my TC Electronics pedals (reverb and delay) are 17 mm apart centre-to-centre so I can't use these jacks at those pedals in stereo.

2) The product description says it will accept 4 mm - 6.7 mm cables but my 5 mm cables did not grip and even an unsoldered 6mm cable pulled out with little difficulty. I used heat shrink to add a little extra thickness but even If these were not being used on a pedal board, I'd be unhappy with anything less than 6 mm cable.

Aside from that these seem otherwise good and are easy to solder (if your solder and wire prep skills are neat). Strip 10 mm of insulation, push back and twist the shield, strip 5mm insulation off the core wire, tin the wires, trim the sheild to 5mm and solder away. If you need heat shrink to add a little extra diameter, use 15 - 20 mm length.

Update: I had high frequency tone loss with a cable, got a negative capacitance reading (which is of course nonsense) with a cable and traced it to a partial short (150kΩ between tip and sleeve) from in one of these jacks. Having tested more of them I found the same issue. I have since replaced them all with a solderless jack set, which is not without its share of issues either but better quality overall.

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.