Cable myth

For a very long time I have read with misgivings that high dollar cables sound different/better than cheap radio shack rca cables.
I took the gamble, an expensive one at that when you consider all the mistakes I made, of making my own " Boutique " RCA cables. Not really expecting to hear any difference , but rather cleaning up the cable mess I have in my HT cabinet.
After one weeks worth of listening to all my best recorded music I now can speak from my personal experence, which is, boy was I wrong.
The music plays louder at lower volumes, the high shrilly tones are gone as is the deep bass boominess.
How can this be ?
If I could be wrong about RCA cables I guess I could also prove myself wrong on Speaker Wire. Which is why I ask this question, is it better to use cat 5e cable for speaker wire in the DYI realm ?

Bill, all I can say is "welcome to the club". I know that some (or many?) on this forum will disagree, but I found that everything matters and makes a significant audible difference.
Treat yourself with good speaker cables and power cords and you'll find a new world (sonically that is).
Chris Ven Haus has a recipe for speaker cables based on CAT 5E wire.
Or you may choose to buy AudioQuest "by the foot". No frills or terminals, but bare wire works very well. It all depends on what impedance your speakers have and how much you're willing to spend.
For HT, if your speakers are 8Ohm and are satellites, AQ type 2 will give you a wonderful upgrade. I enjoy this wire thoroughly in my HT system.
For my dedicated stereo I have AQ type 8, for the speakers are 4 Ohms and the current draw calls for a different gauge.

I made mine out of cat5. I posted pics earlier in another thread, I will look for them....

I used coat hangers. The bass is awesome and the highs are you know well... High

Bill O: Sounds like your original cables were pretty lossy and I'm guessing add some distortion as well.

For speaker wire I think getting the gage right is the most important thing and the other factors not so much. I just strip the wires and and tighten the nuts. Here's the resistance in ohms/foot for some of the various gage wires (copper):

10 .00118
12 .00187
14 .00297
16 .00473
18 .00751
20 .0119
22 .0190
24 .0302

As an example, running 18 AWG wire 20 feet will give a resistance of roughly 0.15 ohms. If your speakers are nominally 4 ohm then roughly 7% of your power is lost in the wiring. Go with 12 AWG and the loss gets down to less than 2%

I thought of coat hangers except that brazing all the coat hangers is going to cost me more than wire.A better option is " two strand barbed wire ", I have miles of that stuff.

Good old 12ga. bulk wire from Lowes does a fine job, though it isn't real fexible.

I use straight 12 or 14 gauge lamp cord from HomeDepot. Just make sure your speakers terminals are big enough to latch on to the cord and that no spare strands are touching anything else. The coat hanger reference was to an experiment some guy did to his brother and friends where he substituted wire coat hangers for high end speaker wire and they chose the coat hangers as sounding best in a blind listening test.

I am using Home Depot Speaker wire at present. I have noticed the wire turning green , that is the reason I am considering doing my own .
I do know the Audio Critic made reference to the blind test using coat hangers.Looking inside a speaker cabinet and seeing all those itty bitty wires leaves one to believe any metallic conductor should work.
I will stand on my previous statement that the cables I made sounded much better than the ones I was ussing. Once again I was not expecting any cyhange in sound, but I did hear it. It may be that some of my RCA cable were old to the point of failure . Nevertheless ,as long as a rca cord is not grounded out or the connection bad, it should work just as well as the coat hanger for speaker wire

I agree!! Most of us refuse to believe that smaller gauge wire will handle what we think are these large loads we lovingly refer to as speakers. I prefer 12 or 14 gauge wire for just the reason you just stated. The wiring tends to corrode over time and turn green. Then it tends to lose some of its performance. The larger wire allows for a greater tolerance of the corrosion between re-stripping and re-attaching the wiring. 16 gauge wire is rated for 12 amps at 120 Volts which equates to more than 1400 watts. About the time I can put 1400 watts of power to a single speaker, its time to get a new hearing aid. Even at the reduced voltage coming out of an amp (about 40 volts) the wire is still good for almost 500 watts. 12 gauge wire is rated at 20 amps or 800 watts at 40 volts. More than enough to get the job done.

The smaller gage wire will handle the current. It will just start to heat up, the resistance (i.e. losses) will go up and eventually, if the current keeps increasing, it will burn up. This is the wire's fusing current.

The fusing current for 18 gage wire is about 83 amps. So you don't have to worry about buring up the wire.

The thicker wire just means that more of the power you paid for in your amp makes it to the speakers instead of being turned to heat in your wiring.

Cool POV on this EEman, best explanation and advantage on large gauge wire yet.

Mine equals something like 9.2 gauge or something...and low inductance is the advantage of using cat5, but I am sure flat earth believers will say that is snake oil too.

Here are my DIY cat5 cables:

[img]http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c326/westfaliamama/IMG_1404.jpg?t=1300005879[/img]


[img]http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c326/westfaliamama/IMG_1400.jpg?t=1300006035[/img]

[img]http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c326/westfaliamama/IMG_1405.jpg?t=1300005823[/img]

[img]http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c326/westfaliamama/IMG_1401.jpg?t=1300005966[/img]

How do you terminate the CAT5 cable to your equipment? Do you use a spade lug of some sort or a banana plug? Do you solder the ends or just leave them bare? What advantage does CAT5 cable provide over strans=ded lamp cord?

I use spades w/ a mechanical(crimped) connection, the advantage is 1) it creates a large gauge cable which has multiple advantages(some explained here earlier by EEman). It is known that electrons flow on the outer surface of a conductor, so the more surface area you can provide, the lower the resistance to the electron flow you will have...Lower impedence, and 2) it is a low inductance self-shielded path as is the point of cat5. 3) its cheap as hell to try this on your own and compare for your own ears as opposed to so many other audio upgrades.

So to answer your question, neither of the first 2 advantages exist with lampcord since your using smaller gauge wire with no low impedance or inductance advantages inherent.

Thanks man. Most people just tell me I have a weird point of view

What you're talking about is called skin effect and there is much debate about whether it's really a problem in the audio range. 12 AWG reportedly starts experiencing skin effect a little above 4000 Hz. 24 AWG (CAT5e) is around 68 KHz. Does this make an audible difference? I don't know.

What you've done by taking multiple strands of CAT5e and twisitng them together is created Litz Wire which is a high end wire for minimizing skin effect.

Do you actually hear a big difference with your cables?

First let me say I read audio gear reviews all the time and generally think the person writing it is full of shit, so I say this with reservation knowing others will think the same of me, but....

Yes these were a big change tonally. I actually felt like my imaging got better with these cables, the speakers just seemed to disappear into the room or gain a surrounding quality...I also felt that the highs were a bit less strident, but I actually noticed that happen with the silver cables the very first time I use them. I had a set of silver 12awg cables and a set of 14awg copper before and I was very surprised in the improvement. I am not one to fall for psycho-acoustic improvements, and I even had a couple friends and my wife listen and try some blind testing too, all who agreed it was an improvement.

Like I said this is a cheap DIY thing, unlike others who hear the difference they want to hear because so much of their money went into the cables.

So the spade is just crimped on? Any way to solder it without destroying the wire? What size spade lug do you use? I would probably have to go with banana plugs or something similar for my Maggies but would prefer bare wire.

Yes unfortunately, I prefer bare wire too but that many semi-stiff loose ends did not cooperate one bit. I looked into the advantages and disadvantages of soldered vs crimped, and decided to crimp them since there wasnt any. I could solder them I suppose but havent needed too so far, so I havent. Do you think I need too?

The techflex was cheap and made them look much better.

EEMAN and Jimna:

I am more than a little confused about the claims of a skin effect and surface area on 12 gauge wire. I could understand that claim if one were discussing a solid core 12 gauge wire. But most 12 gauge speaker wire is made from dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller strands that I believe have a larger total surface area than the cat5e cable does.

I would think the same thing about lamp cord as 73bruin. Not sure what CAT5 cable gets me but it is an intriguing idea to DIY. The skin effect of wire has always seemed to be appiled to lightly loaded wire.

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.