2. cables
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Who uses home brew cables?

Seems to me these days that the easiest thing for the audio hobbyist to cobble up as a DIY project are cables! whether interconnects, speaker cables or power cables. Who's gone down that road?

I've done it- right now I have several home made ICs in my system. Cables I've used range from Klotz, DH Labs and Neotech; connectors have been either Neutrik or Vampire. These days, my choice of connector is Vampire for RCA and Neutrik for balanced. If I get adventurous I cover my creation with Techflex.

I've even made an 8 inch set of jumpers decked out in nice bananas and Techflex. The wire- Lowes stranded 8 awg. The results far surpass the stock jumper bars that came with my speakers. I doubt that whole project cost me $20!

I find the Cardas solder easy to work with. A Hakko soldering station helps too.
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mwp7373
29 posts
 
I think you can get pretty good analog performance using your own work on cables, but the 75-ohm digital thing is a lot trickier. I didn't think cable quality matters that much, and for analog I still don't, but the improvement when I went to a higher quality industry-made digital cable for my DAC was unmistakable. Now I'm stuck wondering just how much more $$$ do I need to spend on digital cable before I hit diminishing returns. It's always something......
mwp7373
29 posts
 
I think you can get pretty good analog performance using your own work on cables, but the 75-ohm digital thing is a lot trickier. I didn't think cable quality matters that much, and for analog I still don't, but the improvement when I went to a higher quality industry-made digital cable for my DAC was unmistakable. Now I'm stuck wondering just how much more $$$ do I need to spend on digital cable before I hit diminishing returns. It's always something......
ebm
9,311 posts
 
Not this week HO HO!!!
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,199 posts
 
It's true that wires are the easiest thing for one to make themselves. Almost anyone can do it, and if it works even half decently might even be profitable to sell. All that it requires to work is a circuit. And its probably reasonable to expect that most any decent quality ones will compete. There is even a pretty decent chance that if things are built well around them that they might win a few games against even some of the heavy (ie costly) competition.

Its hard to make a wire that flat out does not work. Most all the rest requires a good amount of specialized knowledge and skill.
holygrailaudio
94 posts
 
Wire build and configuration is going to make a huge difference, the problem as transparency goes up the need for shielding gets bigger, then shielding colors the sound. A large segment of the audiophile world works with coloration and the synergy obtained in one particular system. The closer you get to neutral i/c's and speaker cables the less tricky it is to have cables that work well with all systems. That is my definition of neutral. You are not going to get anywhere near ultimate performance with cheap wire conductors, oxygen free and exotic alloy does make a difference and so does cryo treating any given cable.
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