Banana jacks - what I wish I'd known before wiring my first panel

I run bananas on my Serge-style panels and the stacking realy is as good as advertised. Where I differ is on the color coding. I tried a strict red-blue-green system for about six months and gave up on it. Too many patches carry both audio and voltage down the same cable anyway, so the colors started lying to me. Now I just buy whatever colored leads are cheap in bulk and keep one bright yellow set aside for clock and trigger duty only. Even that loose rule helps more than I expected. The wobble thing is real but fixable to a degree. I found half my loose-plug problems were cheap nickel-plated bananas, not the jacks themselves. Swapped to better beryllium copper plugs and the grip tightened up a lot. They still pull out easier than a switched jack if you snag a cable, but they stay put during normal use. On panel space, I'd add that you also need to think about depth behind the panel. Some of the stacked banana jacks are taller than mini jacks, and I had one module where the plug bottoms out against a board mounted too close. Had to redo the mounting standoff. Measure before you solder anything.

Making your own leads is where bananas really pay off, honestly. I've soldered up something like 40 of them over the years and a banana plug is dead simple to rebuild when one dies, no crimping, no tiny heatshrink gymnastics like with mini jacks. I buy plugs in packs of 50 and it works out to pennies a cable. One tip that saved me some grief: put a dab of superglue on the screw threads after you set the wire, they loosen up over time from all the plugging and unplugging and a half-connected ground on a banana will give you the weirdest intermittent noise you've ever heard.

What sold me on bananas was a bag of old stackable plugs I picked up at an estate sale for next to nothing, figured I'd try them on a spare panel and never went back. The leads were the real upgrade though. I'd been using stiff patch wire that kinked and pulled at the jack, swapped to silicone-jacketed cable and suddenly the wobble problem mostly vanished. The floppy cable just doesn't lever the plug out when the rig gets nudged. Anyone fighting loose connections shoud look at thier wire before blaming the plugs.

Total beginner question here but when you stack one cable into the back of another, does the signal stay just as strong on all three? Like if I send one thing to two places at once, does the second copy come out quieter or weaker somehow? My brain keeps thinking of it like a garden hose splitter where the pressure drops. Also those metal tips are live when plugged in right? I've got a cat that walks all over my desk and I'm picturing her pawing at the shiny bits.