home made silver interconnect cables

I built 2 pairs of the Chris VenHaus cables mentioned in a variety of places and found what Sean says to be true about the direction of the two conductors. The first pair I built was made with both conductor's "direction" going from one end of the cable to the other (opposite of what Sean suggests) and the other pair with the conductors running in opposite directions. The cables were built pretty much that same (that is, both had my signature sloppy soldering ;-)), and I've found that the second pair produces a far more cohesive sound (e.g. a more solid soundstage) than does the first. Its possible that there are construction differences between the two that might account for this difference in sound, but I've heard others parrot what Sean was saying so I'm guessing that this may well be the difference in my case.

As for the gauge of the wire, the recipe I used recommends very fine wire (32 gauge) and suggests that there is in increase in detail and attack when using this gauge as opposed to something larger like 24-26 gauge. My experience with silver cables is somewhat limited, but I do find that these guys are by far the most accurate and detailed cables I have. That said, I should mention that I'm currently using a combination of HomeGrown Silver and Nordost Blue Heaven cables in the system, and not the home made cables. While the accuracy and detail of my home made cables really does exceed the others, the additional warmth that I get from the HomeGrown/Nordost cables is much nicer to listen to. Nevertheless, its interesting to find that absolute conductor size doesn't necessarily reduce resolution or accuracy as I had always expected.

As a side note, my cables were made with 2 inch double helical twists around teflon tubing (as prescribed by the recipe). I believe the idea was to reduce exposure to RFI/EMI by twisting the wires while keeping the conductors separated as far from each other as possible. Its hard to know if more or less twist would help/degrade the sound quality (or make any difference at all).

Good luck with the cables and I hope they turn out great. While my home made cables didn’t end up in service with my main system (the better of the two pair is in my bedroom system), they were great fun to build and experiment with.

Cheers, Ken

I made some VERY nice cables using the Home Grown silver & copper wire. It's what I believe is called a "balanced, twisted pair" . I twisted together about 20' of the silver & copper wire using a variable speed drill. I paid attention to the direction of the wire coming off of the spools. I tightened one end of both wires into the drill bit chuck while the other ends were socked down into the binding post of one channel of an old amp I had sitting around. I made sure the wires were parallel and pulled fairly tight. I started the drill and SLOWLY began twisting the two wires together until I got a nice tight twist (Notice that when you get done and release the drill chuck, the wire will "snake" around a little bit as some tension is relieved).

I then cut the wisted wire into 4, five foot sections. Again, paying attention to the direction of the wire, I stripped the coating off of the conductors. Using two of the 5'pieces side by side, I twisted together the two silver conductors and soldered them to the hot lead of the phono plug. The two copper leads were likewise then twisted together and soldered to the ground tab on the plug. I then picked one end of my new interconnect as my downstream end and marked it, being consistant with that direction for the other interconnect.

It took me about an hour, with settup & clean-up, to make the pair.

And they sound great!! Cheap too. They look kinda strange but you can put the two wires inside some sort of jacket if the looks and wondering wires bothers you.

You also, like any other silver wire, need to run them in for a good 100 hours or so.

Good luck!

Thank you for the advise everyone. They have been very helpful. What I did was I took out 2 strands from my Kimber 4TC, eached strand replaced by 2 strands of silver cables. My mistake was that I was unable to mark the direction of the cable as Sean and Ken advised because I worked on my cable right after posting the thread because I was excited. It is not finished yet as I still have to solder the rca's.

Nonetheless, there is no need to end this thread. I also have some a few more silver cables to experiment with.

Anthony