The best thing about Live Wire MIDI cables is that they are inexpensive and readily available. They are sold by two major musical instrument and accessory retailers: Guitar Center and Musician's Friend. As long as you use Live Wire's shorter MIDI cables – less than 10 feet in length – they should work perfectly well. They are best for connecting two or three MIDI components that are located close together in one rack or setup for a single musician. Over longer distances, these cables are prone to signal lag and some signal interference, especially if you use the two extra pins to power your audio equipment via phantom power, which can interfere with signal quality unless the cable is extremely well shielded, which these cables are not.

Live Wire MIDI interface cables do not use oxygen-free copper wire and are, therefore, less dependable than other MIDI cords with higher-quality conductors. They do have a spiral serve shield that prevents most types of interference, but the longer the cable, the higher the chance of signal contamination. Their PVC jacket and molding do protect the MIDI wires, and these cables are, overall, pretty durable.

Like most of the other 5 pin MIDI cables on our lineup, Live Wire's cables have male-to-male MIDI connectors with discrete wiring, which means that all five pins are connected. This allows you to use them to power devices with phantom power, though this can cause signal interference. If you plan to use your MIDI connectors to power your MIDI-enabled devices, you should probably choose a different brand. For simple connections, however, these cables perform equally well as the higher-quality products on our lineup.

The precision-molded connector terminals protect the joint between the cable and connectors, making these cables comparably durable to most other MIDI cables. Because they are so much less expensive, however, you shouldn't expect them to last as long or be as hard-wearing as the best MIDI cables. If you treat them well and store them properly, though, they will perform well for years.

Live Wire MIDI cables are available in either red or black PVC jackets to help you differentiate between the cables in your setup if you use more than one at a time. They are available in 1-, 3-, 5-, 10-, 15-, 20- and 30-foot lengths, but we don't recommend buying Live Wire cables that are more than 10 feet long because they are prone to have problems transferring information without errors over great distances. You can also purchase dual MIDI cables from Live Wire that connect both the input and output ports on two devices simultaneously for data transmission with fewer cables.

Live Wire's help and support is sorely lacking, which is why they scored so low in this category. You can obtain support and information from resellers, but it was impossible for us to contact the company directly via the email addresses on their website. Plus, there is no phone number listed on their site, and clearly no customer support team as far as we could tell.