Jimna, I tend to stay away from lugs and other crimped connectors because in my experience the copper wire corrodes and becomes loose over time with any mechanical joint. I prefer to have something I can tough up every once in a while. I suck at soldering and am not sure it gains me anything except another galvanic corrosion site.

Yeah, that's one of the points of contention between the two camps. One will say there's more surface area. The other will say the strands are touching (making electrical connection) and thus the stranded wire acts electrically the same as solid. I've never seen conclusive data supporting either opinion. It's been said quite a few times on in other posts: Try it. Like it? Keep it. Let your ears decide.

XenonMan: Crimps are pretty robust electrical connections if done right though I understand your concerns about corrsion. This does seem like a pretty cool DIY project and I think I'm going to give it a try this weekend. I'm thinking about using some Crimp Sleeves to terminate the wire bundles. If they corrode or don't work I can just cut them off.

I honestly havent decided what I like more either, but the reading I did told me that no one can prove one over the other so I did what I did. XenonMan, what would you do? I prefer bare wire too but this just does not work, I tried it.

I will say the thing that brought me to try this was the silver cables I didnt like much, they were too bright and edgy. These were immediately more smooth and satisfying to my ear. Other than our big DB test night I havent taken them off since.

I am curious to hear alternatives for connecting them though.

You could try making them smaller in diameter since you probably don't need that much current carrying capability. There must be something of fewer conductors which would give you the benefits and ease of connection.

Wonder how the cat5e cables compare with Canare Quad 4S11? Seems like it would offer all of the benefits and potentially be cheaper with no assembly required.

I've really had to crack the books on this one but I'm becoming pretty convinced that the CAT5 cables DO offer a performance advantage. I've got a lot of data but here's a quick summation

1. Due to the skin effect the effective resistance of 12 AWG wires starts to go up around 5 Khz.
2. At 20 KHz the efective resistance of 12 AWG is about 43% more that at DC.
3. The 24 AWG wire is pretty much flat from DC-20Khz.(The skin depth is greater than radius of the wire)

What this means is that some of the higher frequencies and harmonics in your music are being attenuated more than the lower frequencies.

So I made up a CAT5 cable (16 strands of CAT5 which is just a little shy of 12 AWG) , hooked it up, threw in the Bob James Restless disk and yes there was a noticable difference in the clarity of the highs particularly on the sax. I'm going to play more with swapping things around to do more A-B testing, but I'm encouraged.

Disclaimer: Given the nature of the distortion I would think it could be effectively calibrated out by Audyssey or some other equalization system.