AKG K518DJ recable

Navship's stuffs are great for internal wiring in amps but not really ideal for headphones' cables. It's quite stiff and more importantly, microphonic like heck. You might need large sleeve to do the job more easily. Something like 5 or 6mm would be better.

I'm not really sure but you should check with Redco. They do ship worlwide, but last time I checked, it's not really cheap.

 

Heatshrink is very stiff, but if you use  short pieces at intervals, you should be OK. For sheathing, check out some light line from yachting (sailboat) supply stores. Most yacht line has very 'slippery' cores which are easily removed, and the sheath is a bit coarser than paracord so easier to work with. It can be tricky feeding the wire through the sheath, and the fine threads in paracord tended to 'catch' when I used it.

I've never used the 'litz' wire you're talking about, BTW.

 

John
 

I would recommend going with the mogami or canare as well. I don't think navships wire would work well as headphone wire nor would be worth the effort to braid (for me anyway) given the alternative.

 

As another poster recommended, heatshrink should not be used to cover long lengths of wire if you want the wire to be flexible. That said, your second plan (if you go this route) should be fine only heatshrinking the Y-split. You will also need 3/8" (maybe 1/4") nylon filament not 1/8" for 4 wires and 3/16"  (maybe 1/8") for 2 wires. You also don't need to double heat shrink.

the navships wire is not at all suitable for headphone cables IMO, its simply THE MOST microphonic wire I have ever come across, the wire bundle is 26AWG, not the outer coating and the teflon coating on the navships stuff is quite thick, so yes you would need 1/4" nylon, you could possibly get away with 3/8, but I would hesitate, as others have mentioned you need to thread the wire up the sleeve and the friction, even on teflon of a long length is enough to make it a complete PITA.

 

to stop it from catching when you thread it, put some teflon tape, or heatshrink over the stripped end and ypou wont have this trouble.

 

the silver wire you mention, I looked it up on ebay and while the price is good, i'm thinking its NOS czech milspec wire, but it also has quite a thick teflon coat and is probably just as microphonic. it is being sold as audio wire, but I doubt it was specified as such when it was made. i'm tempted to grab some to check it out, as stranded pure silver is not often found and the price is good(although a little low in purity; someone will comment on me saying this but I mean in a relative sense) however I would not use it for headphone cables, possibly internal wiring, or for interconnects

I don't think Cat5 would work very well as it is very stiff. I've heard of it being used for speaker cable, but never for headphones. If you want to experiment (because it's cheap) I would go for cat6 as it is stranded and much more flexible. I don't think it would be the best fit for your situation though as you don't get a whole lot of conductor diameter in relation to the cable thickness.

I've used cat6 as speaker wire and wasn't impressed by the overall diameter of the budled connectors when I split it 4 pos and 4 neg. IIRC it didn't even get me to 20 AWG. I should have used cat5, but I didn't know the difference then.

I used navships teflon SPC and a nylon techflex like sleeve to recable K81DJ's.  The headphones sound much better to me and it was a definte upgrade.  However, like others have mentioned, the microphonics are quite something (loud) now.  It's not a big deal for me since I used the headphones at work and don't really move around too much.

is Mogami W2893 will be good for IEM recabling? is it microphonic? if price/performance ratio is put aside from the equation, which one is better..navships SPC wire or mogami?

The Moga 2893 is great, budget-wise cable. However, the jacket is still pretty thick and heavy for IEM's cable. Would be much better to strip the jack and braid the wires on your own. It's better than the navships stuffs for this purpose.