Subversive DIY Speaker Cable

DVV · « **Reply #100 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 08:30 am »

Quote from: audiojerry

...
If so, Dejan, join us idiots.

Well, I don't know if I'm an idiot or not, but very briefly, my view of the entire matter is as follows:

1. I agree with Dan that a decent home brew wire can, and unfortunately, does in some cases equal far more costly cables in overall performance;

2. I agree with the principle that a decent home brew is much preferred to what a surprisingly large number of people are still using (telephone cables and things like that);

3. I agree with Dan, and have said so many times, that the so-called high end has long ago passed on into the realm of sheer madness in some cases, trying to negate Ohm's law and the laws of physics, if you read their crib sheets, whereas if you look at their products, they are rather ordinary and do not warrant their asking price. Hence my wail for value for money;

4. I do not agree that a good home brew, no matter how well it's made and using what geometry, is the pinnacle of audio achievement. Ultimately, even that copper wire comes in different classes of refinement, and it's no brainer that if the core material is better, the end result should be better too. And all this is not even mentioning using silver plating, silver wiring, carbon fibres, etc, all of which can be shown both by measurement and listening to sound different. For "better", it takes a personal audiotion, and

5. I believe a decent cross section is needed for low impedance and good current conductivity. A single 1 mm thick wire will pass 1 ampere, and you can cajole, seduce, beg and threaten it all you like, it simply will not pass on more because it cannot pass more. Hence, if you want to put an end to the possible current delivery problem, you need a certain thickness no matter what you use for conductor; for me, this eliminates flat cables and less than say 50 strand per side cables. The fact that I am using a cable with 2x256 strands illustrates my beliefs.

To sum up - I think a good home made brew will beat the vast majority of cables supplied with some audio (low fi, if you like), and will certainly beat thin wiring all too often used. But sooner or later, one will come to a point when more than good geometry and standard quality copper are needed and that's when one should carefully move on, auditioning as much as one can before buying, because there are far too many letdowns out there, especially in the high end arena, where the money is good.

Cheers,
DVV

Dan Banquer · « **Reply #101 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 11:47 am »

Brian Cheney in an earlier post on this thread said that the series resistance of the speaker cable was the most important parameter. Other speaker designers I have talked to in the past have essentially said the same thing. So I would like to make a suggestion here. Contact the designer of your loudspeaker and ask him or her what their thoughts are on what is the most important parameter of loudspeaker cable. Let the chips fall where they may.

tkp · « **Reply #102 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 06:11 pm »

I agreed with DVV and Dan in this area. I think both Dan and DVV meant the same thing but DVV explain thing a bit clearer. In my view, speaker cable that has the least impact on damping factor between the amp and speakers is the best speaker cable. This brings us to a few elements in the speakers cable such as inductance, capacitance, resistance and skin loss effect accross the audio band. Having taken the trip myself on some what expensive speaker cables, I have learned that different speakers cable will introduce a "change" not neccessarily better but a "change". Once again, this has to do with the impact of the speaker cable on the damping factor between the amp and the speakers.

a) Large speaker cable reducea the resistance which address one aspect of the damping factor.
b) Multi-strand reducea the effect of skin loss.
c) Construction effects inductance and capacitance althought capacitance is not a big concern with speaker cable.

If money is not a problem then I would get either Goertz or Silver Smith silver foil speaker cable. These speaker cable address the resistance, inductance and skin loss problem in speaker cable. Large foil will have low inductance, low resistance, and minimal skin loss (because of foil shape).

Since I am not made of money, I will stick with cable that will give me the best bang for the buck. In this case the 6 gauge 19 strands THHN speaker cable address the resistance problem. It some what solve the skin effect problem with 19 strands (I could use more strands but it gets expensive pretty quick).

For my current setup, I planed my system out in such a way that the speaker cable lenght could be between 6 inches to 2 ft (No speaker cable is better than any speaker cable so the shorther is the better) and keep the interconnect to be less than 3 ft between CD to preamp and preamp to amp (Dual mono preamp, dual mono amp setup will give you this). I much rather spend the money to put my system in truely dual mono setup then spend money on long and expensive speaker cable.

My recommendation to people is that when you change to new speaker cable, you need to live with it for awhile for the excitement factor of installing a new piece in the system die out and evaluate the "change" to see if it is truely better. I think you will find out that most exotic expensive speaker cable do not "improve" your system in any way but "change" the balance of the sound. This is where system sysnergy and personal tastes come in (ie...warm sounding speakers will sound a bit livelier with speaker cable that suppressed the the low frequency).

My 2 cents

.

JohnR · « **Reply #103 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 06:14 pm »

Heh heh, thanks for the answer Dejan, even if it did take another long post to get it

I assume you bought the vdH raw and terminated it yourself?

I'm not sure why you count flat cable out. I have some Alphacore MI2, which is 10 ga, the same as your vdH wire. I think it sounds very good, actually

Of course capacitance is a bit on the high side.

Has anyone built the Banquer recipe yet?

Cheers

JohnR

Dan Banquer · « **Reply #104 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 07:35 pm »

Banquer recipe???

Does that mean I'm now a speaker cable chef?

God help me.

Marbles · « **Reply #105 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 07:43 pm »

Quote from: JohnR

Has anyone built the Banquer recipe yet?

Cheers

JohnR

I have that exact wire, but I do not terminate it.

Quote from: TKP

My recommendation to people is that when you change to new speaker cable, you need to live with it for awhile for the excitement factor of installing a new piece in the system die out and evaluate the "change" to see if it is truely better. I think you will find out that most exotic expensive speaker cable do not "improve" your system in any way but "change" the balance of the sound. This is where system sysnergy and personal tastes come in (ie...warm sounding speakers will sound a bit livelier with speaker cable that suppressed the the low frequency).

Tien,

I tried the 6 Ga wire from Lowes yesterday, 19 strand et al. It was made by Cerro. Is this the brand that you or Dan use?

While the price was very reasonable, $27 for 100' the highs were a bit vieled in my system.

The bass was about the same as my current reference. I did not terminate it (just used the bare wire). This was not broken in by any means before I listened to it.

Length was around 17' for each side.

If anyone wants me to bring this stuff to the MAF so they can listen to it, I would be happy to.

tkp · « **Reply #106 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 07:54 pm »

Rob,

I hope you build it right. You need to twist the two wires together and use cable ties every foot to prevent the cable untwists itself. As for termination, the Cardas spade from DIY cable works the best so far. The cable will need about one week to sound decent. It sounds pretty bad the first few hours. The engineer in me tell me that breakin does not make sense but I found out that every single component in my system benefit from some period of break in (one to four weeks).

Marbles · « **Reply #107 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 07:58 pm »

Quote from: tkp

Rob,

I hope you build it right. You need to twist the two wires together and use cable ties every foot to prevent the cable untwists itself. As for termination, the Cardas spade from DIY cable works the best so far. The cable will need about one week to sound decent. It sounds pretty bad the first few hours. The engineer in me tell me that breakin does not make sense but I found out that every single component in my system benefit from some period of break in (one to four weeks).

Thanks Tien, on one side I did twist with a rate about one twist per foot, but did not use any ties. The other side I did not twist but left them about a foot apart for most of the run.

What difference will the cardas spade make over bare wire?

What do you use to tie them?

I will put them in another system for a while I guess.

tkp · « **Reply #108 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 08:16 pm »

Rob,

Technically, bare wire is better assuming that you tin the end to minimize oxidation over time. Hower, most binding post cannot make contact with all strand. The Cardas spade provide more contact area but at the penalty of one more solder joint. For me, I don't have a choice since the cable is way too stiff for me to push throught the hole of the binding post and screw down effectively.

If you get the Cardas binding post, you might want to check the size of the binding posts on your speaker and amp (5/16 inches or 1/4 inches). The large Cardas spades work good with the 5/16 and the small one works good with the 1/4. The ironly part about this is that the metal ring for the 5/16 spade work good with the 6 gauge cable (you will know what I meant when you look at the parts). A word of warning that terminating this cable will require a fairly high power soldering iron. You can find out from DueN which one he got that works well.

Xi-Trum · « **Reply #109 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 10:23 pm »

I use 96% tin, 4% silver solder. The soldering iron is Hakko P456-16 (screw driver tip). Its rated temp is 1110 F (599 C). I had to get this to be able to keep the solder melted when it is in contact with the wire and the spade connector.

I just built another pair for my subwoofer. I'm planning to build two more pairs to be cryo-ed.

Marbles, since the wire has only 19 stands and is very stiff, using bare wire may not be the best connection strategy in this case.

DVV · « **Reply #110 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 10:29 pm »

Quote from: JohnR

Heh heh, thanks for the answer Dejan, even if it did take another long post to get it I assume you bought the vdH raw and terminated it yourself?

I do not terminate it. Quite the opposite, I discovered quite some time ago that my van den Hul sounds best when the bare wiring is twisted and screwed into the binding posts as is, definitely WITHOUT any solder. Since it's silver plated, it doesn't oxydize like copper, but every few months, I cut off the next inch. Definitely the best sound that way.

Quote

I'm not sure why you count flat cable out. I have some Alphacore MI2, which is 10 ga, the same as your vdH wire. I think it sounds very good, actually Of course capacitance is a bit on the high side.

Has anyone built the Banquer recipe yet?

Cheers

JohnR

Quite simply John because to this day, I have not yet seen a flat cable martching the shreer conductivity of my 2x256 starnd equivalent. And in things audio, I don't give a hoot about aesthetics. Let it be ugly as sin, so long as does music well.

Cheers,
DVV

JohnR · « **Reply #111 on:** 15 Mar 2003, 11:56 pm »

Um... can you explain what you mean by "sheer conductivity"?

Dan Banquer · « **Reply #112 on:** 16 Mar 2003, 02:26 am »

I think Dejan means low impedance in the audio band.

JohnR · « **Reply #113 on:** 16 Mar 2003, 04:16 am »

What would make one 10ga cable have more sheer conductivity than another 10ga cable?

gonefishin · « **Reply #114 on:** 16 Mar 2003, 05:06 am »

here's an interesting web page.

http://innovations.copper.org/metallurgy/wiremetallurgy.html

I do have a few questions regarding some of the recommendations people make about wire and connectors for audio use. (if this is too far off topic...just say so)

First off...yes, I do believe cables can be made to sound different. BUT, there are far more important things that should be looked at first...namely the room, speaker,amp/pre and source. This is assuming that you have a house with decent wiring and power provided into the house...and to that outlet (or hole...for you Frogger fans;) )

my questions...

What is the fascination with hospital grade outlets? I would agree...that you do want to make the best connection possible...but many industrial outlets can do this too. Hospital (green dot) outlets simply meet a couple of additional UL standards...and...to meet these standards...they must be used with the appropriate plug, which also have to have the green dot. Are these hospital grade plugs used just because they make a good connection...or because they got that neat looking green dot?

I am serious...All this is is a connector...I'm surprised audiophiles haven't started hard wiring their equipment straight to the breaker with one piece of wire.

Also, I have seen a number of people recommend others use THHN wire...I'm curious...why is this?

thanks!

markC · « **Reply #115 on:** 16 Mar 2003, 05:22 am »

Hospital grade plugs and recepticles go through extra "endurance testing" such as having weight suspended by the connection, (plug to recepticle). This ensure a good strong solid connection. Other than that, I don't know how else they differ from a standard plug/recepticle.

gonefishin · « **Reply #116 on:** 16 Mar 2003, 05:38 am »

yea, they are more durable than many standard home outlets. But, the green dot signifies that the component (in this case an outlet) is intrinsically safe...allowing it to be used in possible hazardous/explosive enviroments...such as a hospital room filled with excessive amounts of oxygen.

You can find the 'green dot" on other equipment as well...such as motors and switches. The green dot is even on some motorola handheld radios...in all cases this signifies the same thing. In the case of the motorola radio...it must also be used with a "green dot" battery.

it's kinda like a non-sparking brass shovel.

randytsuch · « **Reply #117 on:** 16 Mar 2003, 05:49 am »

Hey guys,
Just a word of warning if you do use hospital grade outlets, they have an isolated ground, so if you are depending on screwing the outlet to the box to make ground, does not happen in with a hospital grade outlet. When I used them, I added a wire to defeat the isolation.

As for THHN, I use it, based on a recipe Stan Warren gave me a while back. There is a long thread on it over at HD. Works for me, but I never had real expensive wire. It replaced some old Randall Research and some new DH labs stuff I was using.

One recommendation for making twisted speaker cables. Try putting shrink tubing on it, after finishing it. Stan once told me there is a "motor" effect, caused by the current in the wire. The current creates a magnetic field, which causes the wire to move very slightly. Shrink tubing keeps it from moving, and gives you better focus.

Randy

gonefishin · « **Reply #118 on:** 16 Mar 2003, 06:17 am »

Randy...yea, they do have an isolated ground...good thing to keep in mind!

I was just wondering...because this "connector" is usually a little more money than the standard "industrial" version...yet many of the characteristics are the same.

THHN - Heat Resistant Thermoplastic - rated to 90 deg C

I always thought this was just talking about the insulation...really making no reference to the type or quality of the wire inside.

I'm surprised I haven't heard of anyone trying the outlets with the orange triangle

http://www.currentsource.com/Marinco%20Isolated%20Ground%20Devices.htm

thanks fer the reply>>>>>>>

randytsuch · « **Reply #119 on:** 16 Mar 2003, 07:02 am »

Gonefishin,

I think technically THHN is the insulation, but I think people refer to the wire you can buy from hardware stores for building wiring as THHN. It is supposed to be very high purity copper, which is may be why people like the sound of it.

BTW, how do you like your 1000? Planning on making any mods to it?

Randy