Building speaker cable

I have gone from my tube rolling obsession to building my own speaker cable. I was using Monoprice 12g cable; which was okay,, but I always thought that my system wasn't reaching its full potential. After a lot of reading, I went to Home Depot and bought some 14g solid copper cable. After dressing it up into 8 ft lengths and installing the cable, I turned on the amp, and the sound quality was much better. The difference between the Monoprice and the 14g solid copper was very apparent. This really peaked my interest, so after some more research I read that two or three small gauge solid copper, with each copper wire insulated would sound even better. Back to Home depot I went. All I could find was doorbell wire that consisted of 2 18g solid wire each insulated separately. It was 8 bucks for a 65 ft roll, so I thought what the hell, and bought it. After cutting it to 8 ft lengths twisting the 18 g wire together and installing, it sounded like crap.

To make a long story short; does anyone have any suggestions, tips, etc. on building speaker cable?

Thanks a bunch.

 

Found an article online about using CAT-5 cable. I had access to a bunch of used cable so I gave it a try. I basically braided several lengths together and split the ends of the twisted pairs into two larger cables. Sounds much better than the ratshack cable I was using.

-James

 

I went with a twisted design which is supposed to lower resistance or something, I forget. Anyway, pretty easy to do with 14 or 16 g wire, a doorknob and a drill. Vidoes online will demonstrate.

 

I did both of these and kept using in different systems.

The "Full Frequency Range Cable" »

6moons audio reviews: DIY Cables - The White Lightning Moonshine »

 

Twisted reduces capacitance.

 

I build cables based on TNT Audio. On line. It's been mentioned It's the full frequency cable, and is based on Cat 5 cable.
The interconnects are also top notch. I have become something of a cable man. Love building cables
All mine are made to measure.
Ct100 satellite cable with the outer insulation and copper braid removed is the best cable I have ever used.
Seriously deep bottom end, extended top end, fabulous

 

Cat5 cable is typically 24 gauge, with off-brand stuff often being smaller than spec or even copper-clad aluminum. This is very small diameter compared to that desired for speaker wiring. The cable would be adding 1 ohms/10m, which is a large loss, turning 10% or more of your amp power into heat depending on the speaker impedance at any particular frequency, and becoming part of the RLC circuit in the passive crossover.

The cross-sectional area of 24 gauge is 0.205 mm² - a whole cat5e with all 8 pairs bonded together (and another for the return path) still would not equal the area of 14ga cable, 2.08 mm² but would be equivalent to 16ga.

With a solid conductor cable, skin effects become pronounced. Since AC currents will tend to only flow in the outer diameter of the wire, and the effect is related to frequency, this is why stranded (litz) wire is used. Cat5 riser cable is also solid.

The twists in Category data cable are for rejection of interference. The twists also increase the actual length of wire.

The best bet at the Home Depot would be 25 ft. 16/2 Copper Brown Stranded Lamp Cord - $9.48 ea. You can double them up if you want the equivalent of 13ga cable. Avoid the cheap kind that has one aluminum conductor.

 

there you go

 

Biggest difference I found was in the type of dielectric coating that covers the wire. The dielectric stores and releases energy which has a profound affect on the sound.

 

This is another tenet of audiophile lore.

 

I don't think that twisting two insulated wires will reduce the conductor to conductor capacitance of the pair -- basically if you take a typical parallel pair speaker cable and maintain the space between the two insulated conductors, twisted or parallel, the capacitance will pretty much stay the same; if the conductors get closer, which might happen if you twist a pair of conductors that had been parallel, you'll actually increase the capacitance, if you get 'em farther away from one another in free air, you'll lower the capacitance. The biggest factor in capacitance is going to be the proximity of the conductors and the properties of the dielectric. If you twist wires you can lower the inductance which may help with speaker cable performance in the very highest frequencies particularly with longer runs of speaker cable and depending on the nature of the speaker load.

 

One I tend to agree with. Or at least we know that A) dielectric material will affect the velocity of propagation of the cable; B) dielectric material and size will basically determine the capacitance of the cable; and C) many people, like George Cardas, argue that the release of stored energy from the dielectric being released back into the conductor affects sound; I'm not sure if I can hear that but if it is affecting the sound certainly the dielectric materials are each behaving differently in this regard and are a difference maker. Just my anecdotal experience with capacitors of different dielectrics -- there does seem to be a sonic difference. But it's hard to do single-variable listening tests between capacitors, or even cables, where everything is identical except dielectric material, for example. And manufacturers who maybe do test obviously have a interest in selling us something, so we naturally view their research with skepticism. Personally, when it comes to speaker cable, I never hear vast differences in cable, and I think a lot of the differences we hear relate so much too the speaker load and crossover and to the amp's ouput impedance and inductive elements (I mean, I'm using tube amps with big inductive transformers at the outputs), that it's hard to draw conclusions about how a speaker cable "sounds." Capacitance though tends not to be a major issue single the driving impedances are so low, even with tube amps, so I'm not sure about the degree to which dielectric material might impact speaker cable, unless of course Cardas is right.

 

Attempt to translate
Audiofil - feel the sound - DIY Zvučnički kabeli »

 

All Cardas cares about is his bottom line. His whitepapers reek of BS. Inductance is not nearly the problem that capacitance is. Inductance affects bass response.

 

Well, with a speaker cable capacitance doesn't really matter much unless you get into the realms of extreme capacitance and potentially unstable amps. You have such low driving impedances, even with tube amps, that there's no issue with low pass filter effects. And twisting what would otherwise been a parallel twin lead cable into a twisted one won't lower capacitance, it more likely will increase it slightly. With regard to inductance, the effects of that start to show up as increased cable impedance above 1kHz for your typical twin lead cables, but like I said, it's typically so small, even for something like 16 awg zip cord, that you're only going to potentially shaving fractions of a dB off the top of the top octave, assuming and 8 ohm impedance, and I dunno, maybe you're having different phase performance then up in that area of rising impedance vs. low frequencies. If you have a rising tweeter impedance -- 10, 20 ohms -- even that might not be a problem, but if you have one of those speakers that really has a plunging impedance in the top octave, maybe it's more of a problem. But these kind of 12 awg parallel wires that many of us typically use for speaker cable with .15 uH/ft inductances have stable low impedances pretty much down to DC. I dunno that the inductance is having much of an impact on bass response there.

 

Excess capacitance can roll off the hi frequencies in almost any box or open baffle spkr. Electrostatics can cause many an amp to shut down because they cannot deal with hi capacitance that many electrostatics generate in the treble range.

 

There can be peculiar circumstances -- like I said, most of the "sound" of speaker cables has to do with the interactions between speaker load, amp and cable more than an inherent sound in the cable itself. Tricky speaker loads like a lot of electrostatics and ribbons -- and especially something like the ESL57, are going to be the places where you really need to paid attention to certain parameters of both amp and speaker cable. But "excess capacitance" -- I mean if you have a 1 ohm output impedance (a high figure for solid state, probably average for an ultralinear tube amp, SETs can be higher) amp, and a speaker that doesn't present a very unusual load, and you're using Belden 5000UE, 12 awg at 24 pF/ft capacitance, with 500 meters of cable the cutoff frequency is still above 400kHz, if you looking at the low pass filter characteristics of amp output impedance and cable capacitance. I mean, you need some of that extremely low inductance, high capacitance speaker cable, or stadium length runs to really run into a capacitance problem with common speaker cable, the most common sorts of hifi amps, and the most common sorts of dynamic speakers.

 

Nobody uses 500 meters of any cable @ home. That's why long runs in commercial apps use 70 volt lines.

 

Skin effect is applicable to radio frequencies. At audio frequencies, it's immaterial. Speaker cables are all about resistance per foot, and how that resistance interacts with the amplifier and voice coils.

 

Exactly my point. Even at those kinds of lengths the high frequency cut off for a typical amp driving a typical parallel pair speaker cable isn't going to start rolling off highs becuase of capacitance until above 400 kHz. If someone is trying to drive a speaker with a really low impedance and a capacitive load at high frequencies like the original Quads, cable capacitance might be an issue, but for almost every other common home audio installation with conventional speaker cable, capacitance isn't likely to pose any issues.

 

Not so, I built dozens of cable's for friends, every single person felt the cables were much better with a more inert dielectric, none of them new why till much later.

Maybe you should do more listening and testing and less reading and speculating.

Must be a new-be !!!

 

If you want to listen to cable insulation, go to it. "Dielectric" must have a more audiophile credential.