[audiophile_007]

thanks man for the quick reply!

 

[colinharding]

Just put together a new cable for my HD-650s.  The cable is constructed with 1940s Western Electric switchboard wire and terminated in Audio Note silver banana plugs.  
 
 

 

 

[mosshorn]

Quote:

Just put together a new cable for my HD-650s.  The cable is constructed with 1940s Western Electric switchboard wire and terminated in Audio Note silver banana plugs.  
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
That's pretty friggin cool.

 

[Xaborus]

Quote:

Ok I got my hand on UE connectors and Viablue sexy-slim-jacks.
 
Now, this is my tribute to all of the cables I have made

Viablue 3,5mm slim plug. By far the best plug I've ever worked with. Clear tech-flex


Very simple spliter


UE pins + customs UM 3-way
 
Used parts:
Clarivoyant golden plated solid core copper 26AWG
Custom UE 2pin plugs
Viable slim jack 3,5mm
Clear teflon tubing 24AWG.
Clear tech-flex
Clear heatshrinks
 
Sound: exeptional. Very different from solid silver. Sound is massive with big bass and very polite treble. It's smooth, intimate yet clear and dynamic.
 
The only problem is its stiffness. But AFAIR solid silver core was also as stiff as plated copper. So I hope it will soften just as my silver did.
 

Where do you get clear Tech-flex?!?!
I've been looking EVERYWHERE and can't find it.

 

[daigo]

The clear techflex does look really nice with the gold plated wire.  Curious where you purchased it as well.

 

[Pingupenguins]

Quote:

The clear techflex does look really nice with the gold plated wire.  Curious where you purchased it as well.

 
 
Lol, that picture was taken about a year ago. Also, most of piortus-g's stuff comes from exclusive polish dealers.

 

[FraGGleR]

You can get all varieties of Techflex sleeving at Wirecare.com
 
Teflon:  http://www.wirecare.com/products.asp?prodline=TF
Clear PET:  http://www.wirecare.com/products.asp?prodline=PTN
 
Teflon is smoother, but clear is still pretty nice and much cheaper.

 

[sml1226]

Lol, that picture was taken about a year ago. Also, most of piortus-g's stuff comes from exclusive polish dealers.

Two days from being exactly a year ago now. Original post was 8/4/11

I've seen plenty of clear tubing. I've never seen it in a material I would want to use, but it's not hard to find clear tubing. As we seem to agree now, what people generically call Techflex, PET expandable tubing, is noisy, and the easy way to find clear tubing it to get PET tubing. If you want multifilament nylon, good luck, I have yet to see that in clear.

 

[Omark12]

i thought techflex made teflon wire sound really bad

 

[ardgedee]

An easier LOD
 
Soldering an iPod dock connector requires dealing with small, fiddly board tabs and trying to work a resistor into the shell. But there's an easier way!
 
1. Get an AV Out Adaptor. Available in white ($4.50) and black ($5.00). The white one is a little cheaper. Just sayin'.
 

 
Add a 3.5mm interconnect, you're done! Hey!
 

 
But, well, that's the easy way out. We want to do things the hard way. You know, how audiophiles like it...
 
If you haven't tried using it with a 3.5mm interconnect yet, do that first. Make sure the thing works before you start wasting time with it. From here on out, we'll assume everything works as intended.
 
2. Open the dock connector shell. It's hard plastic lightly glued together, and fairly easy to pop open.
 
The shell has two sides: The top has three indentations in a vaguely triangular pattern, the bottom is smooth. The connector, electronics and latch buttons are mounted to the top side, the one with the dents. So focus on popping the smooth side off.
 
I opened mine by sticking a fine-tip screwdriver tip into the slot on the edge at a couple different points and twisting until I heard a slight "Crack!". Then I lightly applied pressure to the edge with some slip-jaw pliers to pop it open, like a clamshell. Going slowly and gently is the essence.
 

The marking on the shell in the photo are from the jeweler's screwdriver; believe it or not that wrench left no marks.
 
When open it should look something like this:
 

Remember -- this is the underside of the board.
 
The shell is the only piece that's sealed or glued. Once the shell is open, everything can be worked loose and pulled out, aside from the wires on the board.
 
Notice there are four wires, not three. Remember, it's an AV adaptor, not an audio adaptor. We're about to discover that the big white socket is actually a four-conductor TRRS connector (tip-ring1-ring2-sleeve), not a TRS (tip-ring-sleeve) connector. Kind of like a headset plug for an iPhone.
 

This is the top side of the board, where the red and blue wires are mounted. This isn't strictly necessary (you can usually just poke the needle tip of your multimeter probe through the wire insulation). To access it without excessive disassembly or destruction: See where the two spring clips for the latch buttons are mounted (blue circles)? They're L-shaped pieces of steel. Stick the blade of your jeweler's screwdriver underneath the spring clip as near to the L as possible and work it upwards about half its width. More than that and you'll risk having even more loose pieces to reassemble later. Then do the same for the other side. The board and dock connector will now be loose enough to work out, by pulling upwards slightly and sliding down the length of the clips' legs. To put back, slide in the other way and push it in, then push the legs back in at the L bends to drive it home.
 
What is that big chip for? I have no idea. There are some smaller ones that look to be resistors, but I didn't check.
 
3. Test the wires. You could try sticking multimeter probes into the 3.5mm socket, but that's difficult and your probe probably is not long enough to reach the innermost contacts. Get that 3.5mm interconnect we were talking about, plug that in, and you can see which wire correlates to which connector on the 3.5mm TRS phono plug you're going to use.
 
Remember to test each color separately with the ring, tip and sleeve of your interconnect, to make sure there's no cross-wiring.
 
Here, both blue and white connect to Sleeve on our interconnect. This means that one color is Ring2 in the context of a TRRS connector, and the other is Sleeve. We can stop here if we wish and connect both wires to Sleeve of the 3.5mm plug on your LOD. Or, if we want to be comprehensive, we can map them all.
 

The outer ring on the socket is also wired to Sleeve; test that and you know where all four wires go.
 
For this particular unit, I got:

Red:	Ring (TRRS Ring 1)
White:	Sleeve (TRRS Ring 2)
Blue:	Sleeve
Green:	Tip

 
Do your own testing, since the wire colors may not be consistent for each unit.
 
4. Build your LOD. And with that it's all over bar the soldering. Snip each wire close to the socket, strip, solder to your preferred variety of conductor, attach a plug and you're done! Not going to show all those steps: You either know them already, or you're better off learning from somebody with better craftsmanship than I have.
 
4" of 24 AWG teflon-coated silver-plated copper later...
 

I connected both the White and Blue wires to Sleeve on the plug. You might be able to get away with using only the White or the Blue wire. I didn't experiment, so I don't know.

The phone plug is a run of the mill NYS231BG. The barrel is from a NYS231, because I thought the plain metal looked nicer with the white dock connector. The heat shrink is about my usual quality of work: sad. Anybody know a way to remove the printing from unshrunk heat shrink? I'm getting tired of tucking it inside-out to hide the printing; that's the main reason why it looks frayed.
 

How's it sound, you may be asking. Not bad. Not bad at all. For whatever it's worth, the dock connector is currently rubber-banded shut; I'll seal it when I'm satisfied things are working as expected.

 

[Pingupenguins]

Very nice. I've never had a problem with dealing with the pins on LOD though. You can get much smaller (footprint) if you DIY it, but very nice.

 

[ardgedee]

It's tricky for some people to solder the tabs on the dock connector; the space is fairly small. This makes the soldering a lot easier since you can have a relatively generous wire-wire joint.
 
I only went about this because it was sitting around and not being used -- and I didn't have any 68k resistors handy for a standard LOD build, even though I had all the other parts.
 
I was surprised, though -- despite appearances, the shell on the dock connector is not larger than a standard large plastic shell sold to DIYers. I have some of those and did a side-by-side comparison.
 
It is true, though, that there are smaller connector shells available (through Lunashops, I don't know about elsewhere), and there have been some fairly brilliant LODs posted here whose connector bodies were made out of epoxy and sanded to shape.

 

[vinyl addict]

I'm gonna be making a headphone cable for an Audez'e LCD-2

Will be using silver wire to construct the cable and the connectors on the headphone end is a mini xlr (not balanced).

So my questions are:

 

- Can a different conductor material be used for the ground wire? I'm thinking copper to save some $$
- Will this affect the sound at all?

 

[Pingupenguins]

Quote:

It's tricky for some people to solder the tabs on the dock connector; the space is fairly small. This makes the soldering a lot easier since you can have a relatively generous wire-wire joint.
 
I only went about this because it was sitting around and not being used -- and I didn't have any 68k resistors handy for a standard LOD build, even though I had all the other parts.
 
I was surprised, though -- despite appearances, the shell on the dock connector is not larger than a standard large plastic shell sold to DIYers. I have some of those and did a side-by-side comparison.
 
It is true, though, that there are smaller connector shells available (through Lunashops, I don't know about elsewhere), and there have been some fairly brilliant LODs posted here whose connector bodies were made out of epoxy and sanded to shape.

 
Really? Nobody knows of Qables? Am I the only one who uses their docks?
 
Epoxy docks are the same size as the smallest iPod dock. Its pretty hard to get a smaller one.
 
 
Quote:

I'm gonna be making a headphone cable for an Audez'e LCD-2

Will be using silver wire to construct the cable and the connectors on the headphone end is a mini xlr (not balanced).

So my questions are:

 

- Can a different conductor material be used for the ground wire? I'm thinking copper to save some $$
- Will this affect the sound at all?

 
Yes you can, and people believe it changes sound. If it conducts electrons, its going to work.

 

[ardgedee]

I hadn't been to Qables' site for quite a while, and I don't have a good excuse for why not. Thanks for the reminder, I'll check them out again.