Duelund conversion to DIY Helix Geometry Cabling

@williewonka, many obstacles and delay when ordering from UK or Europe. Strikes and protests severely disrupting my cable building exercise. A word of caution against using dienadel.de for components. Fighting to get a refund after returning some connectors. Also www.acoustic-dimension.com totally useless. They lure you onto their site with cheapest prices but do not keep any Neotech in stock. Basically drop-shipping. Waiting time - several weeks

While waiting for kit to arrive I made up a pair of interconnects using the CCC, the first wire I received. I debated using as is or stripping the insulation for the bare Cu. With no PTFE tubing yet delivered I went with the cable as supplied. The solid Cu. twin wire is 19AWG and measures 5.9mm in width which I tried to fit into a coil of Neotech 16AWG wound on a 5mm fibreglass rod. I had to separate the conductors to get them to lie a little closer together.  I shrunk some heat-shrink tubing over the rod to increase its diameter should I make another.

I inserted these between my Oppo and amp because Spotify runs all day so quickest run-in time. Initial listening was using redbook files from an external HD

I can state that I do not like what I heard, my wife and I simply love them! Whatever we played we heard details that we had not heard before or had not noticed because they were buried or obscured, but detail is only part of it. It was a more immersive experience with the leading edges of notes easily noticed, making percussive sounds exciting and more real. Darbuka, djembe, tablas and congos sounded excellent, better than I've heard before. Piano sounds wonderful with the player's left hand more obvious. There was a fullness in the portrayal now and that was first listen.

Jacob Gurevitsch's guitar sounds gorgeous. Knopfler's guitar on 'you and your friend' pops out. Listening to very well produced Christina Pluhar's -- Los Impossibles recorded in Chapelle de l'Hopital Notre Dame du Bon Secours, the sense of space in the large hall could be heard even before the music started, not ever noticed that before. My system is border-line on the bright side of neutral and was apprehensive about excessive detail but need not have been concerned, the IC provided a fuller sound and with more detail that was welcome.

Steve, perhaps consider changing your handle to willieWOWwonka  😁

I now have about 40hrs play time and yesterday I found a little of the magic missing. More stuff should arrive in a week and I intend to build another IC with twin bare 20AWG AG to compare directly with the Cu CCC.

Let me finish by stating that anyone sitting on the fence should jump straight in.

@pindac, thanks for bringing the CCC cable to our attention. It's the best IC in my collection by far.  Will be able to compare it to the proven IC recipe in about 10 days or so.

@lemonhaze - glad you finally had a positive experience with the Helix 🖕

WRT:

I now have about 40hrs play time and yesterday I found a little of the magic missing.

That will correct itself at about the 60 hour mark.

But... they keep getting better until around 200-300 hour mark, where they finally settle down.

If you have to remove them for any reason you may notice it takes 10-20 hours for the cables to reseat, before they sound their best again.

Keep the thread posted with the results of your upcoming solid silver IC’s

• Is it OCC or CCC silver?
  • if YES - you should notice better dynamics, details and an even more spacious image.
  • if NO - you might find it a little less exciting

Welcome to the Helix!

Regards - Steve

@lemonhaze I was quite taken with the PC Triple C wire.

Others I have introduced it to have given it a very good appraisal, and I have been demonstrated some of the designs been put in place for it.

As a Wand Wire and Internal Phonostage Hook Up Wire, it has left me very impressed.

I felt confident there was a place for it with the Helix Designs and am glad to have bought into this idea and the CCC Wire to produce these Cables.

Lemonhaze,

Sorry to take this long to post. I haven’t been back to this thread in a while.
I experimented with different size solid wire for the live wires of my interconnects. When I first made my wires with two solid 18g wires in separate tubes I was amazed at how much more impactful the music was, as opposed to my old interconnects. Everything sounded great, but as we always do, I wondered if it could be improved. The bass was robust but I thought if I could get a little more in the high frequency range the sound might be even better.

So, I built a set of wires with different gauges. I originally wanted an 18g matched with a 22g set, but I couldn’t find any OOC6N solid copper wire in that gauge, so I tried 24g instead. I was correct in thinking the higher frequencies would be improved. The highs were simply shimmering. Unfortunately, the 18g/24g setup somehow robbed my impact and my bass response. The shimmering highs were not anywhere near enough of an improvement to offset the losses in the lower ranges.

So, I made a pair with an 18g matched with a 20g. This proved to be a nice combination for me, so now, all of my interconnects have an 18g/20g combination for the live wires. I notice a little bit more in the higher frequencies but any diminishing of the bass and overall impact aren’t really noticeable.

I hope this can help.

Tim