Call 'em and ask them. They have (or can get!) many things that aren't in the print catalog, and wire and cable is a staple of their business. There's also no stopping you from buying a couple of shorter reels of whatever you decide you want, since you don't really need a single uninterrupted 500' run.
Three words for building insert cables: heat shrink tubing. Oh, and two more: tubular braid. I still have most of a 1000' roll of 3/16" tubular braid that I bought as surplus 25 years ago: I'll _never_ use all that damned stuff up. To make insert cables, I strip the pair's shield and jacket back, leaving the two center conductors at the length I need. I cut a couple of pieces of tubular braid, shield the center conductors individually, attach the connectors, and cover the full length of the braid and the connector strain relief crimp with heatshrink from the y to the connector end. Finally, I solder the new braids to the pair's shield, and center another hunk of braid about 2" long over the solder joint (guaranteeing seamless shielding all over the y). I then heatshrink over that whole wad, and I'm done.
Tidy, looks pro. Takes freakin' *forever*, maybe a half-hour per cable. This is generally regarded as A Pain In The Ass, and if you have to do more than a couple of these, you can either a) buy them, since time is money (even if you're broke!) or b) do it right and build a patch field, which is what you really need- like it or not..
Just finished setting up the patch field for my reborn room. 204 good ol' longframe patch points, mostly half-normalled. Swore to myself that I'd never do that again 20 years ago, and seemed to forget somewhere along the way. Took a total of 24 hours over 2 weeks, and if the truth be told, I hated every minute of it. However, there's some hard-earned knowledge in there: doing any kind of elaborate signal-processing setup _without_ using a proper patch bay is a guaranteed ticket to some heartache. The more wierdball hack kluge cables you saddle yourself with, the bigger the bowl of rope salad gets, and the more fragile the setup becomes. Somewhere at about 8 channels, 8 tracks, 8 pieces of outboard gear, and one or more collaborators, you spend all your time chasing cable problems instead of making music.
It's a tough pill to swallow, but IMNSHO it is almost always better to invest the time and effort up front (even if you're practically broke). A lot of people have run aground on the endless technical problems that come from trying to keep well-intentioned kluges alive, and have lost the momentum they needed to keep their _musical_ creativity going. It's not about building the room, it's supposed to be about the music... I guess that I'm kinda the poster child for that, come to think of it. I've invested my 24 hours now, and I don't believe that I'll spend many more hours screwing with the rope salad while I'd rather be _playing_ over the coming years.
As to what cable you should buy- I can't help you there. I'm not one of the people who is able to hear the difference between high-end cables (except maybe for handling noise, of course), so I just buy the stuff that I know to be dead-nuts bombproof. Did I mention that I hate chasing cable problems? I wired the patchbay to the board with Gepco 8- and 16-pair, and for the random wierd dangly things needed to access the outboard gear in the rack, I used Belden 8762 (low-capacitance) 20AWG foil-jacketed pair- primarily because I still have a 1000' spool of _that_ left around from before, and I know that it is nearly *unkillable* as a patchbay interconnect in fixed-installation use.
Sort of funny story: I had about 1500' of good old rubber-jacketed Belden 8413 24AWG pair cable I'd made up as literally dozens of mic and instrument cables, years ago. This stuff used to be known as nearly bulletproof for live use (copper-beryllium bronze conductors). When I opened my old cable case for the first time in over a decade, I found the ozone had gotten to them all: they were all completely brittle, and the outer jacket just shattered and spalled off when I tried to unpack them. Every damned one of them I tried was shorted internally. Junk! Rust never sleeps...
Hope that helps- your mileage may vary.
