Looking for really fine cables at really low price

Thanks for responding. Better to realize their full potential.

Grannyring, Jetrexpro, all
I noticed on the Jeff Day Blog and elsewhere that a bunch of fellas are building Power Cables out of the Western Electric WE16ga. It seems like most are having good success. It appears that Day will be installing the WE16ga PC on his McIntosh MC30s.

Have any of you done this? Results? Best, Rob

Not yet, but I suspect TWL may be using the WE10 ga in their Seven Plus and 10 Plus — American Series power cables. They advertise 525 conductors in the Seven Plus and 315 conductors in the Ten Plus. If they are using WE10ga wire, that has about 104-105 conductors per wire (30ga per conductor like the other gauges of WE wire), so one wire each for neutral and hot, plus one for ground, would be three wires with 105 conductors each or 315 conductors. Likewise, if they are using four runs of the 10ga in a star-quad configuration for the Seven Plus, and one additional run of 10ga for ground, that would be 5 wires at 105 conductors per wire or 525 conductors. Coincidence?

Mojo Audio had good success using some type of WE wire for PCs early on but I believe they ran out of the WE stuff and are using different wire now.

I quit using the WE wire for speaker cable so I purchased several Furutech copper plugs/iecs and plan to start by making a pair of unshielded star-quad 10ga (7ga per pole) PCs for my monoblocks. If that goes well, I will try using the 14 or 16 ga wire I have here with a shield for front end gear. I have a bunch of the wire here that I bought before deciding to use other speaker cables so I need to do something with it.

Thanks Mitch2,
I suspected TWL was using WE. Best, Rob

This is a progress report on the V-Twist wire. The V-Twist is a new DIY interconnect cable designed and distributed by Chris VenHaus of VH Audio. It is a twin lead cable where each conductor is a high purity 24 gauge solid copper wire with Teflon insulation. There is no shielding. A full description is at the link below. The cable presently sells for $15 per foot or $30 per foot for a stereo pair.

http://www.vhaudio.com/v-twist-cu24.html

The V-Twist and Belden 8402 share the same basic cable geometry in that they are both twin lead designs, but whereas the Belden uses old school materials the V-Twist is modern all the way. One consequence of this is an extremely long break in time. Chris says 400 to 600 hours is required---the cable reaches about 90% of its potential in 400 hours and the remaining finishing touches fall into place during the next couple hundred.

I initially wired the V-Twist with Switchcraft 3502AAU RCA plugs so I could do a fair comparison with my Belden 8402 cables that use the same plugs. Chris recommends WBT 0102 Cu plugs for best performance.

My V-Twist cables now have 440 hours so they are over the 90% mark. I will spare you the details of how the sound changed during this time. Suffice it to say the sound changes rather significantly so hold off on making any judgments until they have at least the 400 minimum.

I compared my 1M V-Twist cables to several other interconnects as the link between my phono preamp and linestage. The other cables on hand for a direct comparison were: Belden with Switchcraft plugs, Belden with WBT 0102Ag plugs, Ocellia Silver Reference and Wireworld Eclipse II.

In a nutshell, the V-Twist wire has excellent inner detail, a smooth extended tonal balance, excellent dynamics, and a neutral perspective in terms of soundstaging. The specific qualities are affected quite a bit by the RCA plugs used. For example, the Switchcraft 3502AAU plugs have an inherently warm tonal balance, slightly rolled off treble, soft leading edges on transients, pretty good detail, and a somewhat upfront perspective. With the Switchcraft plugs, that is how the V-Twist sounds. Unfortunately the softness annoys me so I moved the WBT 0102Ag plugs from one pair of my Belden cables to the V-Twist. This made for some very interesting changes. Basically the V-Twist with silver WBTs is fast, clean and detailed, with full extension in the treble, and the softness is gone, but the V-Twist now sounds somewhat lightweight; the bass is not as weighty as it was with the Switchcrafts and there is a hint of "plastic" colorations in the midrange especially. Perhaps I need to use the copper WBT plugs as Chris recommends, or perhaps both the V-Twist and WBT plugs need more hours. (The WBTs have about 150 hours on them.) I plan to run the V-Twist/WBTs for another week or so with signal 24/7 and see how it sounds then. If it still has some issues, I will consider getting a set of copper WBTs.

From what I have heard so far, the V-Twist clearly has much potential. To my ears it is in a very different league than the Belden 8402.