I performed several studies on the the effects of replacing RCA center conductors with mini-lightsabers. The results were astounding, it's like the music was brought to a whole other level of unprecendented detail
Some Cat5 4-wire Litz
And some speaker cable that is far too thick to be usefull...
I don't think braiding is a good idea, as it doesn't result in small capacitance (which is important for interconnects, whereas inductance is more important for speaker cables). Also, if you are using bare conductors and adding your own insulation, such as a teflon tube, the loose fitting of the sheath means the interconductor spacing varies over the lenght of the cable! Other than for looks, why braid? That's why a coaxial cable seems better, or perhas a spiral carefully wound with regard to spacing, such as in the Venhaus silver spiral on teflon tube recipe. It would be best to have nothing but air between the two conductors, such as attaching them to the insides of a tube, but that's impossible to DIY.
A note about digital cables for those using Jon Risch's recipe (the Belden cable one). He recommends a second shield around the coaxial cable grounded at the source end only, and with a 0.01 uF capacitor to ground at the other end. Unfortuantely, while that size capacitor is small enough to prevent audio frequencies from using the outer shield as a return path, SPICE simulation shows that a digital interconnect needs a much smaller capacitor to do that, perhaps as much as 100 times as small (S/PDIF and AES3 run at several MHz).
Headphoneus Supremus Member of the Trade: Rockhopper Audio
Here's a cable I just whipped up:
Beldin 22AWG silver coated copper with teflon insulation
Canare F-09 slim RCA plugs
Switchcraft right angle jack
Lots of heatshrink
Litz braiding for the wires
Nice work Thrice, I was unaware that Belden made silver plated copper with teflon. I just picked up a 500 foot spool so I won't be needing it anytime soon , but it would be nice to know where you sourced it.
__________________ Cans: AH-D2000 ◦ K240S ◦ DT990 '05 ◦ MS-1 ◦ MS-2i Amps:Little Dot II ◦ Pimeta ◦ Rockhopper M3 ◦ WooAudio3 Sources: Ack dAck 1.3 ◦ PCD-300A ◦ S-100 mkII ◦ X-DAC v3 ◦ Xpression III + VP129 Portables: iRiver iMP-550 ◦ Microsoft Zune ◦ 1G Shuffle ◦ Sony D-EJ2000 Speakers: NHT Classic Three Bookshelves ◦ RC Line Arrays + Newform Ribbons My Feedback ● Team Cable DIY ● The Anime Thread ● The Video Game Thread
, but it would be nice to know where you sourced it.
Linear Mode
