haha. what did you learn?
Dont get too excited!
I just had a short chat with martin about them. He contends that they're a fundamentally unreliable form of connection that $%&# with amp layout/signal routing and as a consequence performance pretty much universally, regardless of whether they're used intelligently or not.
Whether thats automatically a totally bad thing or not is open to debate/subjectivity (see the stuff written under yoda to the left). I still maintain that they cant be all bad and may be appropriate, purely on the logic that many amps that use them sound great. Knowing that there is ribbon cable inside my powerball, for example, isnt going to make me like the sound any less, nor will it remove, say, the 5150 from being used so successfully on so many recordings, but theres a good case to be made. Ask martin if you want more details. Suffice to say, I'm all up for learning stuff that goes against whatever I currently think, martin gave me quite a bit on this matter to think about and I've come to think at least a little differently about the use of ribbon cable.