Mine, presently retired. I've been seeing other wire.As an audio signal contains the standard 20 to 20KHZ frequencies it also may contain much higher components. Take the example of a step function (or something like the lead edge of a square wave). Fourier analysis tells us that this can be modeled by the summation of many sine waves some of which may be outside the audible spectrum. This got me thinking of what type of wire was designed to pass higher frequencies? The answer is CAT 5/6. I built speaker cable using three CAT5e runs per side (striped used as ground and solid as positive. The result was a huge increase in perceived detail. Astonishing improvement IMHO.
Zip cord and Nordost Valhalla.
Mine, presently retired. I've been seeing other wire.
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Curiosity. I'd read about " Anti-cables" and wanted to try a homebrew low capacitance variant. The shunt capacitance of the cross-connected cat-5 is relatively high.What would you say caused you to move on?
Curiosity. I'd read about " Anti-cables" and wanted to try a homebrew low capacitance variant. The shunt capacitance of the cross-connected cat-5 is relatively high.
In my experience they all sound different, one from another, and in different systems ..
They all sound different.. there really isn't a one size fits all answer to cable questions.
Interesting. I would expect that shunt capacitance would cause high frequency roll off - but if anything I would say my CAT5E version leans towards the bright side. As always these things are system dependent.
14AWG speaker wire has about 17pF/ft and 0.2uH/ft capacitance- measured with the two runs open for capacitance and shorted for inductance. it also measures at about 5mohms loop resistance/ft. It does have skin effect in audio frequencies.
!2AWG speaker wire is barely different as far as capacitance and inductance is concerned, but it has lower DC resistance and an earlier onset of skin effect.
CAT5 also has about 17pF/ft and a slightly reduced inductance of 0.17uH/ft. it measures about 30mohms loop resistance per foot (it's generally 22AWG) , but there's no significant skin effect at audio frequencies.
Why it might sound "brighter" I can only speculate. Have you checked the frequency response of your system before and after?
I can measure differences in both in room response and measured frequency response at the input terminals of my speakers as a function of cable when I use different power amps, but that's due to the difficult load that the speakers present, the variations in the output impedance of the power amps, the stability margins of the amps, and the impedance of the cables.
In any case it can be simulated and is measurable with no magic involved.
Perhaps the increased resistance of your wire has some positive effects.
Perhaps, with 3 runs in parallel, the reduced inductance and higher capacitance does something- but you would get exactly the same effect by paralleling three 14AWG runs, but with lower resistance.
16 AWG DC resistance is about 4mohms/ft- and that's for solid for which there are standards but not for multistrand for which there are none. Multi strand is often higher, say 5mohms/ft. For a loop this becomes 10mohms/ft- so your 25 ft runs are 0.25ohms or there about which is excessively high.I built a pair of these:
http://diyaudioprojects.com/Power/Low-Inductance-DIY-Speaker-Cables/
I had previously been using #16AWG lamp cord from home depot. The new cables are audibly different from the old ones. I think the fact that my run is quite long makes the difference especially audible, since at 25 feet, the inductance of the #16AWG cable is significant within the audio band.
If you're shopping for a speaker cable, try and find one which is optimized for low inductance and low resistance. These characteristics can ensure that the signal at the speaker terminals are as identical to the signal at the amplifier terminals as possible.