Covering silver wire for use as a speaker cable

Why not clear plastic tubing for an aquarium pump? It would insulate perfectly and is primarily just air dielectric, except where the silver wire occasionally touches the plastic.

If you like the sound you could experiment with all the other materials that will be suggested in this thread :^), such as cotton, Teflon, etc.

How heavy a gauge you need (thus requiring more than one strand of the "very fine silver wire" per leg) surely depends on what amount of resistive loss you can support without an ability to compensate through increased volume.

If the amps are very close to the speaker (assuming monoblocks and a separate preamp), you would be able to use very short lengths, and may not need "to layer and bundle it to make large enough conductors for speaker cable".

I am suspicious heavy gauge speaker cables. What problem are they trying to address?

I'd be looking for some natural cotton sleeving.

Regards,

Thanks for the replies so far. Nsgarch "Fine" meaning 6 nines grade.
Metralla, I already own some pretty pricey Speaker cables (Synergistic Tesla Apex). I just want to see what this silver does.

The wire is about 26 gauge. I have enough that I can multiply it together 5 or more times to make 10-15 foot stereo cables.
I just want to try it first with the wire doubled then tripled and then maybe try another layer and so on.

Feeding this wire through even aquarium tubing ( pretty good idea) might be very hard.

Is there any kind of epoxy paint that could be used ?

Ozzy, so, you were referring to the quality of the wire (although 26 AWG isn't exactly heavy;-) The problem with silver is it tarnishes rapidly when exposed to air; and if you want to bundle/twist several together strands together, they need to make good contact, which they won't if they begin to tarnish. So it's essential to either coat each strand with some kind of high temperature polymer ike Paul Speltz's Anti-Cable (not generally a DIY operation) or enclose the wire(s) in an airtight jacket of some kind.

I think you could probably do the latter using 4 foot lengths of shrink tubing (clear would be nice ;-) and then covering the joints with another short length of shrink tubing. An inexpensive heat gun makes shrinking the tubing pretty easy. I'd also recommend you make the cable in two separate runs for each speaker. That way you virtually eliminate the capacitance and inductance problems of 2 conductor single jacket cable.

If the wire is bare, pass it through polyurethane and let it dry & cure hanging overnight. Then snake each strand through a long 2mm cotton sleeve and make a loose litz braid of all strands. Soak a 1" band of ERS cloth in Goop cement and wrap around both ends. Remove urethane from ends with an exacto knife, twist and terminate wire bare.