Effective vibration control technology for stay cables is extremely critical to safe operations of cable-stayed bridges. For super-long cables, passive linear damper cannot provide sufficient damping since it can be only optimum for a given mode of cable, while a long cable may vibrate with several modes. This paper focuses on multi-mode vibration control of stay cables with passive magnetorheological (MR) dampers. Firstly, a 21.6m-long model cable was designed and established in the laboratory.Then, control performance of the cable with a passive MR damper was tested. The test results show that modal damping ratios of the cable in the first four modes can be improved significantly with the MR damper. It is further demonstrated that optimal tuned passively operated MR damper can outperform the passive viscous damper.