DIY speaker cable made from cat 5 type cable
I have some pieces of 4 pair solid wire cat 5e you can have. I usually toss the spools with less than 75ft on them. How much do you need? I may have some 50 pair cat 5e solid wire, I would have to look tomorrow. How many conductors do you use for each speaker pair? Here is a link to a wire calculator. http://home.hiwaay.net/~rgs/awgcalculator.html Jim |
When I made Cat 5 speaker cables following the design published by Chris ven Haus, I obtained the Belden plenum-rated cable #1585A from Radio Shack. http://www.venhaus1.com/diycatfivecables.html Regards, |
I found the cat 5 cable at Home Depot @ $0.41 per foot. It is stuff made by General Cable. I tried to look it up on their web site but could not find it. The only cat 5 I found was all pvc insulation or 3 pairs w/ FEP insulation and 1 pair with some sort of poly... type insulation. I e-mailed to ask about the type at Home Depot and hopefully they will respond. |
I heard back from General Cable very quickly. It has the following constuction for the Home Depot cable: CONSTRUCTION: Conductor 24 AWG solid bare annealed copper Insulation 3 pairs FEP / 1 pair Polyolefin Pairing Varying short pair lay Color Code Bandmarked, 4 pair Color Code RipCord Polyester, Applied under Jacket Jacket PVC As can be seen the 4th pair does not have FEP insulation. Won't this degrade performance or is this OK? I'm looking at making bi-wire cables using 4 of these cables per speaker, 2 for the woofer and 2 for the mid/tweeter of my VR4jrs. |
