[danvprod]

Something I have been working on. I found this awesome cable. It's 5 conductor, 16 AWG teflon covered silver coated stranded copper. Braiding all 5 conductors together gives me ~9 AWG. I terminated these to some nice BFA-style plugs and wrapped both channels in tech flex.

[mresseguie]

Thanks for the post.

How long did you have to burn them in before they sounded their best?

Have you ever used other silver cables before? If so, which brands?

Michael

[Johnny2Bad]

That's similar (but not identical) to a cable I've been using for about 15 years now. 4x PTFE 18 Ga Mil-Spec stranded silver over copper per channel (= 15 Ga equivalent). I braided all 4 runs together. Works well for me with 40 wpc.

With 5x per leg (2x 5 = 10 16Ga total per channel) you should be below 10 Ga equivalent but not quite 9 Ga. (25% of +3 Ga equivalent, or 25% of the way to 7 Ga from 10). Nitpicking, I know.

Am I correct in interpreting that you are using silver wire with PTFE dielectric, or is it silver coated copper (Mil-Spec)? Solid or stranded?

And ... is it two parallel runs of 5x or one 10x twisted run split into two at the termination point for each leg?

[Davey]

L, C, R??  Characteristic impedance?
You should measure/determine all those.....for reference.

Dave.

[danvprod]

Hi --

thanks for the comments.

@mresseguie -- I did a standard burn in of about 24 hours before starting to listen. I've had two different listening session so far (several hours each over the last two night). I didn't notice a significant change in the sound during that time. We'll see over the next 100 hours or so. This is my first experience with silver-coated/silver cable. I've used other designs (commercial and DIY) --  (solid copper, single crystal OFC, standard stranded designs).

@Johnny2Bad. Thanks for the clarification on the AWG calcs. This is Mil-Spec stranded silver coated copper (but the strands seem much thicker than normal stranded wire and as a result the cable has much more "memory" for lack of a better word that other stranded cable. It will keep a bend, for example. PTFE dielectric is correct. Two parallel runs of 5x, one for L and one for R, wrapped up in techflex and terminated is the design.

@Davey -- I still need to make some measurements, I haven't done that yet but good idea. I wanted to see how this cable would perform first and then go from there.

Here is what the raw 5-conductor cable looks like.

[Speedskater]

It should sound about the same as most twisted pair (or more) cables with the same total end-to-end resistance.

[Mike B.]

Good job. DIY is a great way to enjoy the hobby.

[Johnny2Bad]

Thanks for the updates. It looks like a reasonably competent speaker application cable. PTFE is comparatively stiff to begin with, and with the thicker dielectric layer typical of the Mil- types, I am not the least surprised you find it far from limp.

Using the odd number of cables in the bundle there can't be any noise cancelling effect due to common mode rejection, but there should be little need in a loudspeaker application. Keep your speaker cables away from AC lines, cross at right angles, and so on. The usual good practices. The capacitance values would be complex but that is also not generally a critical criteria with speaker cables, although in some cases can contribute to instability. As long as it's reasonably low it should be a non-issue.

That leaves resistance ... we can let that fall where it may, as the overall equivalent AWG is large and it looks like you are benefitting from a relatively short cable length overall ... and finally that brings us to inductance, which is important for amplifier > network / driver > amplifier circuits.

It appears that you have a low rate twist to combine the two legs into the one Techflex® -encased +/- cable assembly. That is different from a pure parallel lay as far as inductance values would go. Still, one would expect the values to be low, all things considered, in your geometry.

All the above might result in a measurable rolloff above perhaps 10 KHz, but even if it could be graphed the values would be extremely low ... much less than a tenth of a dB at 20 KHz. Probably even much less than a tenth of a dB at 100 KHz. Group delay will be extremely low (low resistance, good conductivity of copper) ... measurable, again, but only just. Perhaps the high frequencies will arrive at the ear first by an insignificant amount of time (nanoseconds, and only a few nanoseconds at that).

If you have access to some test equipment it would be interesting to see your results, but to be honest I'm not sure we could learn much from them, especially since we can't be there to hear the result.

So, that leaves subjective evaluation, then. Enjoy (or not, as the case may be).

Is that a PVC jacket or some other material holding the 5-cable bundle(s) together? It looks like something else. It's not terribly important in light of the thick PTFE dielectric on the cables themselves, just curious.

[Wayner]

While I do like the idea of DIY cables (I make my own interconnects from copper RG/59U) I have decided to make my life and my speaker cables simple. They are made from 12awg KnuKonceptz speaker wire. Its very flexible, oxygen free and fairly cheap. I buy 50 feet at a time from KnuKonceptz on Ebay.

Have fun.

[danvprod]

KnuKonceptz makes the BFA-style plugs. Very high quality IMO.

[earwig]

I put 6 strands 15 foot strands of silver plated Teflon surplus military white 18 guage (of which I have tons of) into a braid plastic sheath and silver soldered nice spade lugs ,sounds pretty good actually !