cat:5 for speaker cable

[hammerin]

just finished a pair of speaker cable's made from CAT:5 cable and tried them out with my girlfriend's stereo{sony STD-635 w/wharfedale emerald 97 speaker's }and what a tremendous difference it made !!!! twisted them with three strand's at 6 feet for bi-wire. I can't get over what a difference it made,hopefully they will get a little better after a little break in.I plan on using them with KLF-20's and kenwood monoblock's. has anybody else tried this cable ? let me know of your result's with it.

home theater

klf-10's {till 20's come in next week} front's

KG 3.5 rears

rc3II center

denon 3300

denon dvm-3700

boston acoustic's PV-800 sub

[marksdad]

cable is cable, as long as the conductores are made of good copper

[Al Klappenberger]

Hammerin,

Could you be more specific as to what "a tremendous difference" sounded like. I personally believe cable makes no audable difference unless the old cable was defective or not making proper contact due to age. I replaced my lamp cord cables with AWG #10 some time ago and noted no difference at all.

Next, put the old cable back for a little while to confirm that difference.

Al K.

[TheEAR]

Al,

Its the world famous placebo effect.I also heard HUGE gains in bass,midrange and upper treble when switching from standard Monster 10GA to M series M2.4B

Before the bass was slow and undefined with the M2.4B it sounds as fast as a planar driver and impact has nuclear power!

Imagine

[hammerin]

had monster cable XP 12 ga. bi-wired befpre i tried the cat:5. And after I changed it I listend to several cd'd and several music dvd's that I listen to several times a week. I noticed a huge improvement in the lower bass,{lot's more punch} midrange,also seem's to have a lot more presence. I did not change the position of the speaker's at all.It's just a GREAT improvement

[3dzapper]

Ear,

How can you hear the midrange and treble over the Subs? As a matter of fact as loud as you play your subs, how can you hear?

Rick

[hammerin]

I'm not running sub's.

[tpg]

I run CAT5 to the front sats of my PM5.1's... and I made some speaker cables for my HT using CAT5... very detailed airy sound... not so sure I liked it though. I only had one channel up though so I could compare. Maybe it would have sounded better with two, but I don't know.

[Al Klappenberger]

Claud,

Now, put the old cables back for a little while and you will hear the same improvement. All you have done is "freshen up" the electrical connections to the cables. The change to new cables may have also simply casued you to listen more closely to what you were taking for granted all along and not really hearing. The new cables just made you listen by forcing your attention to the details. This is a normal human raction. A lot of money had been made this way by manufacturers!

Al K.

[Underhanded Penguin]

I was a skeptic that cables made any difference at all until recently when I had the chance of A/B ing two cables at my local dealer. It was between generic cables and Transparent musicwave plus on some dynaudio 52s. He switched the cables on the fly and the difference was very obvious. Detail and clairty improved and sound opened up. It almost sounded like a completely different speaker. Mind you these cables cost about $1400. So that was enough to convert me. I bought the Musicwave which is a lot cheaper.

It is a definite improvement IMO. Not just placebo.

Having said that, the price of some of these cables are rather ridiculous...

[ZAKO]

If the cables had sutch a great difference & improvement why do you need BURN IN? Just wipeing the ends of the cable cleans them up & improves performence. Do this at least once a year. Copper turns brown then green. Just cleen them.

[Al Klappenberger]

Penguin,

How did the dealer A-B a set of cables? It would require a set of very low contact resistance realys at BOTH ends of the cable run, an aditional cable to operate the realys and a switch control them. To simply run around and connect one, then connect the other will NOT do it! To connect both at the speaker end and only switch the source end won't do it either. You would also have to NOT be informed as to which cables were operating at any time. Also, one measurable difference between cables might be their capapcity. This will have difference effects on different anplifiers. Please explain EXACTLY how the A-B test was done and the equipment used.

Al K.

[Underhanded Penguin]

Okay Al. So it wasn't a very controlled test to your standards. But using the same amp and same speakers, the guy disconnected the generic brand while playing music and connected the transparent cables. The process took about 20 seconds for both sides. Volume was the same and qualitatively (according to my own ears)the vocals opened up and detail and clarity improved. It was enough to sell me. But no it wasn't a proper A/B test to lab standards. The difference was honestly big enough so that I was 100% sure it was not placebo. It's just my account. Feel free to completely disregard it. I'm happy with my cables. The point I wanted to make is just that cables can make a difference. And oh the equipment was dynaudio 52s, classe amp, classe cd player, audioquest something cables (dunno what but it was pretty generic looking) and the transparent musicwave plus 8ft w/ spade connections. Sorry I don't know the model numbers.

[Al Klappenberger]

Penguin,

Yep, I'm pretty hard-headed about the speaker cable subject. There is just no good science to back up the claims. The subjecive aspects are just to big to ignore and my own tests indicate there is no difference unless you are going from cables that are just too small, like magnet wire or something, to something much heavier. With no good science to explain the differences claimed there is also no good science to base the engineering on!

Al K.

[Champagne taste beer budget]

I make no claim to having a golden ear or the resources to do all the testing of wires I'd like to, but I feel the people at McIntosh Labs do, so I defer to their findings. I know I've linked to this before, but some of you may not have seen it. It's a somewhat lengthy read, but packed full of good and applicable information.

http://home.earthlink.net/~rogerr7/wire.htm#gordongow

Especially note the portion on Gordon Gows' speaker wire test.

Sorry I can't do a clickable link, butt eye jest aen't thet smrt.

[Al Klappenberger]

The McIntosh cable paper, I think, sums it up. The problem is really with the

human brain / ear combination. Realizing that we hear with out brain more-so

than our ears is the main reason everybody hear different things. We also

hear what we are listening for and our brain fills in the rest. The only

valid test of speaker cable would be one done using the relay system McIntosh

used and a listener who had no idea what cable was in operation at any time.

Even here some kind of speaker cable has to connect between the relays and

the speaker and between the other relay and the amp! It becomes a constant

factor. The source impedance of the amp is also involved. McIntosh amps use

an autoformer on the output of each channel compared to a simple low

impedance source of most SS amps or the relatively high output impedance of a

transformer in tube amps. Construction of a cable has to major factors. That

is, series inductance, which is not even close to the series inductance of

the woofer voice coil, and parallel capacity. If you put the two wires of the

cable close to each other, the inductance goes down and the capacity goes up.

Wide-space the wires and you have low capacity and high inductance. You don't

want inductance OR capacity, so how do you make the cable? This is like 50

Ohm Coax versus 300 Ohms TV "twin-lead" cables at radio frequency. This

represents some impedance level for the cable itself. As the McIntosh paper

says, audio cables do not act like a "transmission lines" because they are

simply not long enough to be a significant part of an electrical wavelength.

To have that sort of effect at audio frequency the cables would have to me

about a half MILE long! This is necessary in order to set up the "standing

waves" along the line that cause impedance transformations. The bottom line

is that all that counts is that the DC resistance needs to be insignificant

compared to the speakers impedance. That's all! Simply use the largest wire

you can successfully hide and that the budget will support. I found that

going from ordinary lamp cord to AWG #10 made no difference even with the

rather long cable lengths I am using. Making the cable lengths to all the

speakers equal is also not important assuming the CD resistance of each is

very low compared to the speaker impedance.

Al K.

[Tony Reed]

What Al is saying is basically what PWK said for years, and he did have a golden ear.

Tony

[Ray Garrison]

Speaker cables sound different. I won't claim that expensive ones are better (?) than cheaper ones, or even that cable "A" sounds "better" than cable "B", but they do sound different.

This is pretty easy to tell.

You can go to Home Depot and buy, like, four samples of two 8 foot runs of wire of varying construction methods for $10 or $20, or a bit more if you want to try fancier stuff. Hook up your system with pair A. Listen to something. Ask yourself questions like "How many people are there in that chorus?" or "Who's in front, the bass player or the lead guitar" or "How far behind the speakers is that drum kit" or "is that reverb real or electronically created" or any number of other questions. Take notes. Change wires. Listen to same piece. Ask same questions. At least for me, answers change. Switch wires back, answers go back to original answers. I can't say why they sound different, or even what the nature of the difference is, but they do sound different.

[sfogg]

Ray,

"Switch wires back, answers go back to original answers. "

You know which wires your switched back to.

The real test is to have the wires switched without your knowledge of which is which and you identify them. This is the basis of ABX tests.

'Hearing' is easily influenced by preconceived notions and expectations. There are tests done having audiophiles compare A to B and record their impressions of each. They have given all the standard prose about the differences... only to later be told that A = B and nothing was changed except that they expected to hear a change so they did.

Shawn

[leok]

Al,

How hard headed are you about tweaking the capacitance on a scope probe so that the overshoot you see is really in the circuit and not in the probe and cable? Are some of those frequencies in the audio specturm? Yes they are.

Think of that perectly good zip wire speaker cable as a scope probe and you might get a little more fussy. If you can see it in the audio spectrum, you sure can hear it.

A co-worker used to design switching power supplies. He said they used Litz wire because it improved efficiency "But," he said, "that was at high frequencies." I asked how high. He said "Oh, 20KHz."

The conductors in the wires of my sennheiser headphones are Litz wire.

I don't think it's a case of being able to tell that there is a difference between wires, find that easy. What's hard is to determine which one is really better, whatever that might mean. Just because it's difficult, however, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Leo