Millenium MCT-20

OK at first I thought this is the worst designed battery compartment ever. It did not make contact with the terminals well enough to keep contact. I was about to return it when I tried one last time. This time I pushed in and down and I heard a click... and now I think its the best designed battery compartment ever. In and down.
Well this is a must tool for any tech, sound engineer or musician if you are a sole traveller. Bands, buy one. At this price its the cheapest of its kind. But the quality of the unit is unbelievable. This is a tank.
Plug one end of the cable into the correct socket. Plug the other end to the correct socket for it. And config seems to be catered for. Turn the switch to the numbers. The corresponding light will light up. Now you will need to know a little about how your cables should be wired but for guitar leads and balanced xlr, 1 to 1 , 2 to 2 and 3 to 3 should be the norm.
If the connectors are not standard, you can even use the supplied probes to test continuity. It beeps. So no need to hold the probes steady to glance at a light.

With connectors in place, shake the cable whilst testing and you will see if theres a break.

Now it is not going to fix your cables, but it will tell you which ones are good to use and which ones need to go to the repair man or the bin.

Its big and bulky to allow for speakon cables. It is worth every penny.

All you need is a 9v battery. It even has a built in battery check.

When I was extending my studio I needed to create a very stable dual network - one for audio (AVB) and one for control of the Presonus equipment.

This device helped me no end in ensuring the network connectors were satisfactory as I fitted them and then tested them with this unit.

There are many other cable test features on this unit and for the money it worked well (and still is) for our studio environment where you can get cables creating problems at any time.

Low cost answer to find those dodgy cables, but it is one that does work.

Recommended.

I got this for making my own cables. Its smaller brother MCT-10 does not do 3.5mm TRS so I went with this one. It is easy to use and tells me when I make a mistake, e.g. solder a conductor to the wrong pin or when the solder on a pin is touching the connector shell. There's no male jack on it but one can still test female jacks by connecting to a male cable.
I've used the contact testers on mini XLR connectors, they're a bit thick for them but do the job. They're also very useful on splitter cables.
Would be nice to also have USB A-B-C plugs just to check if purchased cables have gone bad but I'm completely satisfied otherwise.

Let's start with my only complaint: the battery door is a bit hard to close properly. That's all.

It performs exactly as advertised in every other aspect, it measures continuity and in a very clear way. It can measure conversion cables (e.g. 3.5 to RCA) too, which was not clear to me when I bought it, so that's a nice surprise!

Have not used it often/long enough to say anything meaningful about durability or battery life, but it feels very solid. Packaging could be better, as i've had it force open/drop out of the bottom of the box when I dropped it in from the top, but a piece of ducttape fixed that.