Speaker wire... Diy?

I use Belden telephone trunk line cable. One pc for each terminal. Strip an inch of insulation off each strand, twist together, then solder them together. I used 63/37 but high Ag may be better. You end up with something like 72 insulated strands of 28g (if memory serves me) that are around 8g bundled together. 
Testing revealed no significant increase in Z up to 1MHz. I’ve been using them in my biamped system for years. They’re a fairly large amount of work to build but I think the product is worth the effort. 

The entry level Transparent cables are in your price range and are so much more musical than any of this home brew horse patty DIY stuff!  For the live of music...please at least try some Transparent.  Call Transparent, they will guide you plus your investment is protected for future upgrades and they retain better value than most if you would need to sell.

musicloversaudio writes:

I love it that people think they can equal at home what takes engineers with decades of experience and 10s of thousands of dollars in testing equipment. If they could only listen to Gen 5 Transparent Audio Reference cable, they would cry.

How right you are. The poor noob, he’s being led down the primrose path. Just like all the other poor noobs.

Note the lack of people saying they went out and tried a whole bunch of professionally built product in their price range AND THEN made some DIY that was just as good for less. You will never see any of that because it just doesn’t happen.

The one guy here who admits to doing a lot of DIY cables also admitted (unintentionally!) he can’t even build them to sound the same left to right, and "fixes" his mistakes by replacing them with bought cables. No kidding. Not making this up. And people still think its great. That’s how whack it is.

And yes, as a matter of fact one way I know is I’ve tried it myself. Nothing I ever made came anywhere close to what I could have bought with the same money. Nothing you make ever does. If you stop and think about it for like 5 minutes, but then again maybe not we stopped teaching free market economy, logic, and reasoning long ago.

I had a friend who had to be the King of DIY. This guy has a whole workshop bench area in his basement where he has been making speaker cables, interconnects, and power cords for at least 30 years. Whatever DIY’ers think is the greatest coolest thing, material, geometry, technique, he’s done it. One day he calls up all excited to bring over and show me his Topper, the One Interconnect to Rule Them All. He’s compared it in his system and his sounds just as good. So he brings it over.

Well, that was fast. I mean I actually felt sorry for the poor guy. He did the same comparison in my system and it was obvious even to himself his DIY was nowhere near as good. NO soundstage, NO depth, NO inner detail, on and on, whatever sonic attribute you crave in audio his cable sucked it dry, spit it out and left it rotting in the sun. Then I pulled a dirt cheap cable from out of my old cables drawer. His DIY he had spent 30 years on was blown away by the oldest, cheapest, not even worth it to me to try and sell Synergisitic wire I had just sitting around in a drawer.

But hey, I’m sure the OP will do better. lol! Hey on second thought musicloversaudio you were wrong! lol! I’m not crying, I’m laughing! Whatever. Point is, its a joke.

@ddjr ...

Romex you say? What gauge?

!4 or 12 - your choice - but I stress - Romex is just for prototyping - DO NOT use romex wire for long term power cables - it will break if flexed continuously and does not clamp very well in the plugs


Have fun :-)


@lalitk - take a look at this link - these cables are extremely good
http://image99.net/blog/files/category-002ahelix-speaker-cable.html

@musicloveraudio RE:

I love it that people think they can equal at home what takes engineers with decades of experience and 10s of thousands of dollars in testing equipment. If they could only listen to Gen 5 Transparent Audio Reference cable, they would cry.

Yep - at $17000 for speaker cables - it’s the price that made me cry - not the sound quality. But I do agree that TA cables are excellent.

I am not claiming that my Helix cables are as good as Transparent Audio cables - but for the BUDGET CONSIOUS DIYer’s among us, they come a lot closer than many other commercial brands of cables that I have tried. Most of the DIYer’s that have tried them replaced some very highly regarded commercial brands, including Nordost, Cardas, Audioquest, Kimber Kable and a couple of esoteric brand silver cables.

I have spent the last 4-5 years developing the Helix cables and trying different wires, so I agree - it can take a while and a lot of $$$ in wasted wire.

Unfortunately, I do not have the expensive equipment - just my ears AND the ears of those people that decided to take a leap of faith and try the Helix cables and provided feedback pertaining to the different wire types/gauges they had tried.

They have been used on various systems ranging from a $350 mini system, to systems in excess of $70k and in each case I’m told they made a significant improvement.

I have tried all of the wire types listed on the web site. The more expensive wire from Mundorf offers exceptional details, but that is only slightly more detailed than the Duelund wire, which again is only slightly more detailed than the Silver plated Mil-spec wire. It really depends on how crazy you want to get chasing audio nirvana.

DIY is not for everyone - but for those of you that are up for the challenge, Helix cables will offer exceptional performance.

If anyone has any questions just ask - Steve

williewonka writes:

for the BUDGET CONSIOUS

Scroll up and read my post. Pay special attention to how cheap the professionally built cable was. Pay super special attention to how hard this guy worked only to fail at even that low bar.

DIY’ers in other words have it completely backwards. In trying to get more for less they actually get less for more.