I'll give the CAT5 speaker cables a try as soon as a can get hold of some good quality cable.

I don't want to use the plain white jacketed stuff. Somewhere I saw some purple CAT5 cable that had NASA grade or NASA approved written on it. If I can find some of that, then I can have some NASA grade speaker cables.

I have electrostatic speakers (Acoustat 2+2s up front, 1+1s in the back) which have extremely low impedance (capacitive) above 10kHz and so the low inductance of the braided CAT5 cables may give some sonic benefit.

In the case of the 2+2s, my modifications include seperate inputs for the LF and the HF transformers, so I can further experiment with CAT5 type cables on one or both of the inputs.

Anybody have a recommendation on what would be the best terminaton for these CAT5 cables?

Paul

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the 1derful1

[This message has been edited by Paul J. Stiles (edited January 01, 2003).]

I think the crucial part for any cable is the pureness of the copper and adequate gauge for the length of the run. The hyperbole that has been created in the wire arena is purely market propaganda that seems to have created a nice market. When many dollars or hours are spent I'm sure the listener is straining his hearing in order to justify the effort or cost; in doing so will probably hear things they did not pay attention to before. You can't fool scientific double blind tests. Many have been done and listeners repeatedly have failed to tell differences between cables.
Save your money and buy some music.

There was somebody advertising on Audiogon that was selling what is essentially a DIY cable that looked to be made of the Canare cable with good quality terminations and sheathing. It wasn't badly priced, I think $65 for a 6' pair. I'm considering it myself. Since I've been doing everything else myself lately, including speakers and a tube pre-amp I was going to try making some but it would probably cost as much.

While I believe the differences in 'sound' between various cables is somewhere around nil, I am a strong advocate of _high quality_ cables, with good gold plating on the contact surfaces. OFC cable is more immune to oxidation than the plain wrap stuff. At the very least, good quality will ward off intermittent connection problems in the future. The Outlaw cables look pretty good in this respect.

I'll have to once again put my lot in with the 'hound, with the caveat that the famous CAT5 cables might sound different simply due to excess capacitance or something. If so this would fall under the 'distortion' rather than 'improvement' category though.

I'm in agrement with you two.

When I went from the 12ga to the Cat 5's soumething sounded muted. That's all I can realy say. It just sounded like something was muted. Went back to the 12ga and everything sounded "right" again. The differance was simmilar from when I went from an 18ga to the 12ga with the gold expanding bannana clips. Some people wouldn't notice a differance, but given the amount of time that I listen to my system...I can tell if something is off, and if something has changed and brings more clarity and detail into the mix.

Like I said, I still cant put my finger on what the differance was, all I know is that something sounded "off" when I used the cat5's.

However I am debating working with a dual 16ga design for bi-wiring that uses a teflon-tape wrap as in insulater.

[This message has been edited by fmcorps (edited January 02, 2003).]

I finally finished making 7' pair of Cat 5 cables for my mains a week ago. They still need more break in time but it has already shown my time spent was worth it. For total of $50 including nice spades and banana plugs, I could not ask for more. Of course, you can spend more (a lot more) and get a better pair but if you are looking for a value, this is hard to beat. I have Vifa A/V kit speakers from Madisound which are said by other consumers to be superior to many consumer grade speakers costing up to $1,000 for a pair and this Cat 5 cables bring out a lot of good things from my speakers. For those who say "not notice the difference" may be because of the speakers they have. I used to have a pair of JBL N-38 which are decent speakers for the price but I could not notice the difference when I was testing different quality interconnects. I did the same test while using my Vifa A/V speakers, and there it is! Quality interconnects do make differences in clarity, detail and the dynamics (pardon me if my terminology is less than par, I'm not an acoustical engineering major). So do the speaker cables. Think of it this way, if a person driving a Honda Accord which is a decent car for the price, decides to put a set of tires that are made for Ferrari and expect Accord to accelerate like Ferrari will be in for a disappointment. On the other hand, if a Ferrari owner decides to use a set of average tires from say, a department store which I doubt any Ferrari owner will, that person is not making the most out of that fine car. What a waste of time that will be. Its about the compatibility and fine tuning.

It's quite possible that the cat5 cables have measurably different characteristics than typical 12 gauge copper. Given that 12 gauge copper is close to the theoretical ideal you can draw your own conclusions.

Here is an idea I am getting ready to use ...

There are two ideas behind most exotic speaker cable: reduce overall resistance, reduce reactive effects. Without going into all the reasons, the solution is to provide good quality conductors sufficiently separated, and not have a current conducted continously down the center of the current pathway. My choice is as follows:

I'm putting in pairs of Belden 8281 video cable for each speaker. The resistance of the sheilded braid is on the order of 1.1 ohms per 1000 feet. That means that a fifty foot speaker run would use 100 feet of cable, there and back. Cable resistance becomes about 0.1 ohms between amplifier and speaker. I am not using the center conducter of the video cable. That way, back EMF concentrated in the center conductor has no where to go and will not 'fight' with the desired current.

The problems introduced are physical ones. The cable will not flex as easily as normal speaker cable. The ends must be stripped back, the sheild pulled back and the center conductor cut off, then protected with small diameter heat shrink. Then the shield braid, without the center conductor and its insulation, is too thick to be used in some banana plug connectors or amplifier/speaker posts. I'll use banana connectors that can accept large cable. To restore insulation and appearance, I plan to use heat shrink on the modified ends right up to the banana connector.

While some effort will be required to make the cables 'speaker ready,' it is much less effort than braiding foot after foot of CAT-5 cable for long speaker cable runs.

What do you think, people?


[This message has been edited by bestbang4thebuck (edited March 22, 2003).]

Two thoughts come to my mind. First, it's a pretty creative idea, and hats off for that. Second, you're fixing something that's not broken, but if it makes you happy, great.