Help me build speaker cables please!

Man, my amazing wife took the kids out and I’m sitting here listening.. these sound so good! I just want to settle on a final design and build them, but I definitely need to spend the time to find the right geometry & materials. Ah, the endless search for perfection.

I will say, though, that I made a pair of jumpers from the silver plated 12awg and some gold plated brass nakamichi banana plugs I had laying around. They sounded ok, but I wasn’t that impressed. I was doubtful of the cables at that point. I decided to take out the bananas and just use bare wire. That made all the difference. I’m looking forward to the silver plated BFAs once I settle on a design..

@toddverrone - They get much better after 100 hours :-)

BTW - I updated the web site to include my hypothesis as to why they work. It makes sense to me - finally (LOL)

http://image99.net/blog/files/d048bbacfce9bcad4a025be804771d9a-76.html

The Silver plated BFA's are amazing - but they also took a couple of days to burn-in and reach their best

The silver plated 16 gauge Cryo Mil_spec I used for the signal is excellent - I see no reason to move to solid silver for the signal.

Enjoy the music :-)

Man, you and your blog! Chock full of info. It's funny, I found that before I ever got on Audiogon...

I did notice that you mixed up your neutral and signal conductors in your parts list. You listed the twisted pair as your signal and the silver plated copper as you're neutral. Which is understandable since you busted that out in a day.

Your reasoning for the performance of the helix cables seems spot on. I never thought of the first point..

@toddverrone - got it - I will change that immediately

Thanks

Chat Later

@toddverrone - I’m now getting an incredibly cohesive image with pinpoint placement of artists and instruments now the bananas have burned incompletely.

Some tracks that I have used for auditioning include...

Hide and Seek.by Imogen Heap - is a track that uses the phasing technique. It has always amazed me at how this track seems to envelope the listener, placing sounds behind my head. But I had noticed that with each cable tried certain reverberations of the image shifted position behind me.
- With these cables those reverberations now appear to be centered right between my ears - very unnatural. A bit like wearing headphones.
- Is it finally in the correct place? Without hearing the track in the studio system I have no way of knowing - but it makes sense this is the correct position - finally?

Is This Love - Bob Marley - perhaps one of the largest images I hear from any studio recording. Instruments that appear to be located quite a distance out side of both speakers. It is also a very dynamic track with extremely fast percussive elements and has some very nice natural sounding reverberations and a very smooth bass line with nice details

Papas Calientes - La Chimera - from a very nice album titled Buenos Aires Madrigal - it transports me into another world - I’m sitting in an out door cafe in an Argentine square where the performers are roaming from one cafe to another - it certainly sounds like superb live engineering - but is it?.- who cares :-)

Undring - Sigmund Groven & Iver Kleive - is superb live engineering at its best with spectacular spacial acuity that envelopes the listener, But for entertainment, I get a kick out of watching the woofers "dance" at around 10 Hz part way through this track - a testament to the abilities of these cables, the pipe organ and the engineers.

There are now so many of these special tracks - just too many to list

I hope you are having a similar experience :-)

Regards - Steve