JoshK and I have been plotting in secret to build my new 25' wundercord. It will start with a Furutech Gold plug, pass the juice along a 25 feet of star quad twisted, teflon-coated, silver-plated copper wire (6 12-gauge strands to make a roughly 9-gauge cable), and will terminate in my OneAC 4.6 amp power conditioner, which will be modded to remove the power switch and upgrade the outlets. You can read about assembling star quad cable here:
http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/cables/messages/32920.htmlI went to Roosevelt Island to work with the master in his workshop yesterday. JoshK creates his masterpieces while looking north over the tip of the island and the East River to Hell's Gate and the Triborough Bridge. Its an unusual and inspiring view. I believe audio equipment manufactured with grand views like that sounds better. Certainly its a nice place to work.
Like many designers in the highest rank, Josh operates efficiently, setting priorities and moving from one task to the next with great purpose. He created a broad space on his workbench and immediately set out the bottles of Old Speckled Hen ale I had brought. We went to work on that first.
Next we turned to my OneAC power transformer, complete with a label on the case that was included with it free of charge--"do not plug anything into this power conditioner except the laser printer." Josh peeled the label off immediately. I assume (correct me if I'm wrong, Josh) that he thinks the label degrades the sound. We didn't do anything else to it except to open the cover and plan our modifications. It contained a powerswitch, a transformer, and a board with two large axial caps, a disk cap and a resistor, and two pairs of outlets. We also identified an unusually fluffy and soft dustball, one of the finest dustballs I've ever seen, truly audiophile grade.
Josh has a "nibbler" to enlarge the hole through which the power cable passes into the box. We will bypass the on-off switch. One pair of outlets will go straight to wall and the other will be power-conditioned. We will replace the outlets with Hubbell 20 amp outlets cryo'd at NASA. (Who says this isn't rocket science?) Replacement of the two beefy-looking caps with fancier stuff will wait for another day. I am looking into getting the dustball cryo'd.
We moved on to the main task for the day, which was twisting the wire. We calculated that the wire would shorten by about 10% after twisting, so we cut 2 56-foot lengths of wire and folded them in half. Josh attached the wires at one end to a piece of wood with a bolt in it and the other end to another piece of wood. We made sure the wires were untangled and then I stood on the far piece of wood while Josh fired up his variable speed drill and spun the bolt attached to the near piece of wood. It worked like a charm. The wires twisted up neat as could be and kept twisting tighter and tighter until the drill could twist no more.
The next steps are to apply heat shrink, loosely wrap the ground wires and then cover the whole thing in a Techflex polyethylene mesh expandable sleeve before terminating the whole shebang in the plug and power conditioner. Those tasks will wait another week because we ran out of Old Speckled Hen.
