MY name is Stuart and I am a cable Nazi.
There are good cables and bad cables. Some people say they can hear the differences between good cables, I cant. But as I can certainly hear the difference between a good one and a bad one. And then we go down the slippery slope of signal path, true bypass, faux true by pass, buffers, capacitance...
If you use them a lot they have to be reliable. I make my own with Mogami cable and the heavy duty Neautrik straight and r/a Neutrik plugs, they have a great cable clamping system and the solder connections dont break. For pedals, the solderless Lava cables and the small right angle connectors are convenient to config for tight spaces and reliable.
Stay away from curly cables no matter how cool they look, and keep everything as short as possible. Once you you reach about 20 ft of cable, you enter the next set of problems mentioned above.
Hey Stonestreet- this weekend I need to change a guitar jack which has gone crackly, the swithcraft part is sitting on my desk to remind me. Its an early 90s JPN strat, lol.
Stuart