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Western Electric and Belden 8402 wire


Les Lammers

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I stumbled on this a few years ago and have been using this wire since then. No plans to change either. The WE wire discussed was actually made by a company in Rhode Island and is simply tinned copper in a cotton sleeve. It is unobtanium now but Deulund  and the Swedish Supra 1.6 wire is similar.  You  can get the Belden 8402 IC's on the auction site for about $65. This stuff simply works great. The SS guys can only change wire to tweak the sound. We roll tubes and coupling capacitors. Try this and you too may be amazed and forget about high priced wire. I'm driving H3's with it and have them bi-wired.

 

 http://positive-feedback.com/audio-discourse/adventures-in-real-sound-with-mr-shirokazu-yazaki-2/

 

You can scroll down to the wire.

 

 

Edited by Les Lammers
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IIRC, I bought a spool of 8402 in the early '70s... made some nice microphone cables. Those cables held up extremely well, but I was the only one allowed to coil them up.  I finally let them go with a couple of microphones I sold off. It was a litle bit of a pain to work with but worth it once you were done. I may still have one of them in a box of gear, will have to check.

 

Bruce

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Hi Jeff,

Silver plated copper has never sounded right to my ears. I'm running 12 AWG on the woofers and 16AWG on the tweeters of Heresy III's. Amp is a Dennis Had Inspire. 5 watts with 6L6G's.

The wire and IC's are cheap enough to experiment with. Once the Belden 8402 settled in I no longer thought about IC's. YMMV.

Les

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23 minutes ago, Jeffrey D. Medwin said:

 

 

 

Comment :  When things sound wrong, it may be the result, not of the inserted piece, but a bogus piece in front of it. AMPS , Les, are the biggest turkeys of all, NOT speakers.  Maybe the wide bandwidth wiring was allowing you to hear the nasties in your amp, like a electrolytic capacitor.  The amps I build all my past 4 decades go FAR FAR beyond the Dennis Had " Inspire" - or whats out there and commonly used,.  You may have heard the wire " right", but the problem was not the wire!!  That is my point to you.  In the finest of systems, nothing beats pure silver, Siltech, Ensemble, etc., but thats a $10K bill to do it right.

 

 

Howdy Jeff,

I went on a conscious quest to scale down my rig. I simply got tired of the chase. When I got the Inspire gear I took it to a friends house and we hooked it up to his Volti Audio modified Klipsch Belles. My Inspire is triode strapped and I had Pope 6V6's in it with a 5Z3 rectifier. We were both amazed and it held it's own when we ran his 2A3 and 45 amps. IMHO, the biggest issue in audio is poor recordings/digital transfers. $10K for wire is not in my future. 😉

 

Peace,

Les

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53 minutes ago, Jeffrey D. Medwin said:

  The amps I build all my past 4 decades go FAR FAR beyond the Dennis Had " Inspire" - or whats out there and commonly used,. 

 

 

Yeah, that Dennis Had character doesn't know what he's doing.

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On 3/4/2019 at 6:32 PM, Jeffrey D. Medwin said:

" An inch of bad wire can ruin the musical experience. "  RWF.

Like those copper lugs pictured above?  What good is silver clad wire when the signal still has to go through a solid copper lug and a big blob of solder?

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9 minutes ago, CECAA850 said:

Like those copper lugs pictured above?  What good is silver clad wire when the signal still has to go through a solid copper lug and a big blob of solder?

 

=== true. My very small gauge MILSPEC copper wire has no termination from amp(s) to speaker. Same wire and no termination from crossovers to drivers with my Jubes. This very thin gauge wire gives up nothing to much thicker 12 gauge Beldens best copper wire, nothing. Bass is every bit as deep, quick and tuneful as the 12 gauge. Same wire, not a double run, used for IC’s. They sound every bit as good, if not better, than upper end Audioquest, Kimber, Grover etc. 

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On 3/6/2019 at 4:14 PM, Jeffrey D. Medwin said:

 

 

 

Comment :  When things sound wrong, it may be the result, not of the inserted piece, but a bogus piece in front of it. AMPS , Les, are the biggest turkeys of all, NOT speakers.  Maybe the wide bandwidth wiring was allowing you to hear the nasties in your amp, like a electrolytic capacitor.  The amps I build all my past 4 decades go FAR FAR beyond the Dennis Had " Inspire" - or whats out there and commonly used,.  You may have heard the wire " right", but the problem was not the wire!!  That is my point to you.  In the finest of systems, nothing beats pure silver, Siltech, Ensemble, etc., but thats a $10K bill to do it right.

 

 

 

Mr. Medwin, would you be so kind to enlighten us with a few pics and verbiage of YOUR amplifiers to which you speak?

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54 minutes ago, Jeffrey D. Medwin said:

 

 

Basically, always only a two-stage tube SE amplifier, first tube MUST be a Mu of 100 triode with a Shunt Regulated B+ supply, directly coupled with heavy pure silver wiring to :  ( one of only three Finals tubes ) :

 

      the grid of a JJ 2A3-40

 

      or a 6005 ( very low Power, triode-connected ),

 

      or to the grid of a KT-88 run as a Pentode with its own separate Shunt Regulated B+ supply for it's Screens. 

 

Always Zero Feedback.   LSES power supply, which stands for Low Storage Effect Power Supply, ala the Serious Stereo 2A3 monoblocks. (  Look them up on line.  'Best commercial amps, sonically and in design,  I know of . )

 

I use only directly heated tube rectification, L1/C1/L2/C2  B+ filters, with all power supply filter inductors VERY importantly being 10 Ohms or less in DCR, and all Cs being Film Caps only, not exceeding 50 uF per location ( a FAST reacting supply ). I also ( uniquely ) bypass my C1 and C2 film caps - going to the Finals - with GTO film caps, capable of doing 1.500 Amperes peak instantaneous. 

 

Careful attention is paid to wiring, using either multiple duos or  "trios" of Mil Spec ( 12+12+14 M22759/11 on grounds ) or multiple runs of Polished Cardas SIlver 19 AWG in a few locations. 

 

Very careful attention to layout.   RCA jacks always within 2 inches of the grid of the Input / Driver tube, two Cardas Silver runs for this short two inch input tube run.  Direct Couple uses three Cardas Silver runs in parallel.   

 

All my tube op points are VERY carefully chosen to conservatively run a tube, for maximum sonic performance and maximum life span.  I use Golden Ratio plate dissipations, 62%.  So, a 10 Watt rated plate I will run at 6.2 Watts dissipation, by reducing current across the tube, but not necessarily voltage across the tube. 

 

I make extensive use of multiple film cap bypassing in key capacitor positions, values selected by ear.  I also design for maximum DYNAMIC contrasting with my amps.

 

Here is a two stage stereo 6005 prototype I did in 2018, plays lovely in its ( very low - less than one Watt ) output power range.  14 gauge welded steel chassis, powder coated.  The 2A3 Finals tube will be 2 or 3 watts of Power Output, the KT88 5 to 7 Watts of Power Output.

 

Jeff 

 

1 - Rewire Grounds to 8 AWG 12+12+16  EXPLAINED.jpg

 

 

Ahh............... ya, I might know a thing or three about 2-Stage, Zero-Feedback, PTP-Wired, 2a3 Output, Single-Ended, DHT Amplifiers..........297EBEB4-189A-4D94-8B2B-AF331EDE4B20.thumb.jpg.30f6d349655b899c970afcb58e14de94.jpg

 

;) Matt.

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7 hours ago, Jeffrey D. Medwin said:

Looks impressive if one didn't know better. There are some things you could do to vastly improve that build .

 

 

Jeff........ my customers listen with their ear-holes, not their eye-holes, and you know what they say about the other-holes, like cowboy hats, everyone has one. ;) 

 

For the life of me I can't figure out how to find enough room in my amp chassis for that 8 AWG wire, or the 18 Million Watt-capable coupling caps.  But come to think of it, I suppose I could VASTLY improve this build if I wrap the whole amp in silver and claim bandwidth is DC to Light. ;)

 

Matt.

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