[MS1605]

H-fi,

I recently have been bitten by the diy cable bug. I already have about 25 different styles of paracord and thats all I want to do is make a ton of cables. That being said, I set off to youtube to watch some tutorials. Most videos for making 3.5 to 3.5 cables show the typical setup of 3 wires. Left, right and ground.

Then I came across a few videos that threw a wrench in the equation. I found a few videos where they used 4 wires. Left, right and 2 wires for grounds. What is the point of this?

Thanks for any insight. Im stoked to try assembling my first cable!

 

[Noone025]

with 4 cores, you can have a dedicated hot for each speaker and a dedicated cold for each speaker. the shield is then just that, a shield which is grounded at the source end (ie not at the speaker end).
 
The benefit of doing it this way is a technical improvement, but likely not distinguishable to the average listener on normal gear. As the shield is not a part of the signal chain or reference, the interference is pulled to ground (like earthing).
 
That being said, try a few options and see what you like. I had fun braiding cables which in theory automatically cancell out RF as the twists achieve even RF (thus cancelling out) like unshielded network cables use.
 
Have fun, try a few different things, see what you like.

 

[MS1605]

Thanks for the reply. I was reading up on braiding. I did not even draw the inference between the audio cables and the UTP cables you mentioned. Good call!!

What I dont understand was in the videos I found, they soldered both grounds to the jacket. So how is that a dedicated ground for each channel?

The only thing I can think of is im not understanding the wiring right. Right goes to right, left goes to left and ground goes to ground (jacket to jacket.) How does the cable know that there are 2 wires soldered jacket to jacket or 1 wire?

 

[duncan1]

Noone025 is right in what he says . With a dedicated earth return on each this reduces the induced/radiated noise/distortion on them and the amp being fed back into the system.If the earths are BOTH soldered to the frame as you say that is not good. Long ago JLH showed that STAR-EARTHING is the "way to go" each part of the equipment is taken back by earth return to the SAME point. This greatly reduces the earths having to run round all the casing picking up noise. The more star-earths the better.from each equipment. Remember signal returns go back to an earth point unless it is a specialised input./non earth.
 

 

[MS1605]

Duncan, you had me at the first "earth"...

Time to google some of that. Thanks.