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Adventures with copper foil cables

AguycalledSimon

AguycalledSimon

pfm Member
I commented on another members recent thread (on the “Audio” forum) about copper foil cables, and there was some interest about the foil cables I made myself, as well as the connectors, which I designed & 3D printed. I thought this would be more suited to a thread in “DIY”, so here we are

I plan to make up a set of cables shortly, so can post some images later in this thread, but thought I could start the ball rolling now with a little bit of background, and see if there was any interest in the community:

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My journey with cable started when my audionote (japan) cables, both speaker & interconnect, started having some issues at the connector end – repairing looked a nightmare, with litz cables and epoxy coating inside the connector, so I thought it might be fun to see how close I could get to their sound by making some of my own cables

Surprisingly close, actually, and for really low cost

In fact, in some cases I thought they were equal – not sounding the same, but quite viable, so I carried on with lots of different configurations, and found some common areas that seemed to always give a marginal gain (as always, YMMV):
· Screens - I never liked what they did – sound just became dull
· “Shared” return on L & R channel (ok, this was pretty marginal, but looked “trick”)
· Silver cable was better than copper. Silver/gold was better than silver. Copper was still good but also cheap, so great for experimentation
· Flat cable is better than coax
· The influence of connectors is exaggerated – I never heard massive differences (much more on this later on……)
· Small differences in wire gauge are easily audible (it’s possible? this might be more noticeable for flat cable vs coax – just conjecture)

My DIY-cable journey is certainly not over, but I have reached a point where they sound very good indeed and comfortably beat commercial offerings, from companies I respect, up to £1k, and probably above.

Along the way I have refined the use of copper foil in interconnects, designed & made my own phono plugs, made my living room stink of acetone, and finally found that the venerable Allen Wright got there several decades earlier, and reading his book could have saved me a couple of years of effort

I’ll post a little later about my self-made phono plugs, but I the meantime, it’d be great to hear from other foil users……
 
A diy cable thread - Fair Play!

Do realise there will be a wide range of pretty-well informed technical opinions here, yet which are far-more likely to be constructive than cavilling pointlessly - share & share alike for mutual benefit is this room's ethos. Looking forward to seeing what you have to share : )
 
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Thx Martin, and yes, I'm hoping this gets a fair hearing but welcome all constructive points from more knowledgeable folks (they should not be hard to find :))

What i found interesting is that my very un-knowledgeable journey, using ears not engineering, ended up being similar in many ways to the very knowledgeable Allen Wright (but i am not ruling out that this was dumb luck rather than rigorous testing...... )
 
Pilot episode: why I hate phono plugs!

· There is no agreed size standard - everyone seems to have slightly different dimensions
· No-one I found makes any which are designed for flat cables
· Solder connections
· Cable & connector pins are different materials
· Did I mention solder?

It all started when I bought some expensive Eichmann plugs for my 2nd attempt at DIY cables (Solid-core duelund) to replace the ultra-basic amazon RCA’s I used on cable attempt 1. Verdict – no appreciable difference.

In my setup I have an Mytek ADC which I use to rip vinyl, so its pretty easy to record using different kit and then randomise listening back – I could certainly not distinguish any difference (I know there could be a number of losses and variables across the recording and playback chain, but in general its pretty transparent and I use it to confirm what I hear as a direct feed and not as the only determinant)

So, I did some DOE (Design of Experiment) on the same plug, using different solders, and in some cases no solder, just twisted the wire to hold in place on the lugs. The only one which made any repeatable (albeit small) improvement was the solderless one

Now I went a little crazy……

I scoured Amazon, Ebay and some other well-known sites and cobbled together a Frankenstein “thing” which allowed a direct connection from the cable to the + & - phono sockets on my kit – in other words, it was a “no-plug” (I later found that 47labs did something similar). It looked awful, lasted as long as a UK prime minister and was a real pain to make – but it sounded the best of all

The evolution of Frankenstein into my current Cinderella 3D-printed design is convoluted and is a story for another time – assuming there is an appetite from you guys for continuing (actually I might do this whether anyone wants to know or not - this is like free therapy!)

What I can share now (and would be interesting to hear from anyone who has come to any similar conclusions – or not) is: solder joints/pin contacts when connecting kit are a potential blocker for exploiting the potential of the kit.

Season 1 Episode 1, should this post get commissioned to become a full series, will look at the evolution of my cable selection preferences

Advance warning/spoiler alert – if season 1 gets a warm reception, season 2 will revolve around my DIY tonearm, currently sounding better than my SME V – you have been warned….Stop me now, before its too late…….!
 
Funnily enough I remember a tnt review some years ago where the reviewer used several types of connector, including the original Eichmann 'bullet' connectors and IIRC came to the conclusion that a solderless connector (that pressed each wire to the phono socket) did indeed sound different.
Makes you wonder about the effects of solder on sound though. I find newly soldered takes a few hours for an edgy brightness to subside.
Keep it coming. :)
 
chiily said:
I've been trying to buy the pre-amp cookbook from that website for a while now. Their payment links are borked. No answer to emails either :(
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I managed to get the cable cookbook 2nd hand from a forum (can't recall which one). It has a few pages excerpted from the preamp cookbook, which certainly looks interesting, if you are able to source a copy

I did buy some silver foil from their site a little over a year ago, but it was really not set up well for commerce and the comms was almost non-existent, and i was about to write off that the cable would ever arrive, when suddenly it got delivered

Hope you manage to get a copy from somewhere......
 
andyr said:
You're a millenial?
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At 50 (young at heart...and mind).

andyr said:
Great that you have your answer. Allen was a guru - and a very helpful fellow.
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Not into valves, though did own an Audio Innovations integrated early on in my long 'career' as an audiophile...
Guru is not something I associate with knowledge, was he an engineer?
 
andyr said:
You're a millenial?



Great that you have your answer. Allen was a guru - and a very helpful fellow. :)
Click to expand...
He certainly was. I'm assuming that after his death no one is looking after that web site, someone must paying the bills though.
 
First off - I'm a cable believer. Made all my own and concluded that copper litz sounds the best in my setup. Didn't like silver!

As for solder connections, again I agree that they take time to settle but what I don't understand is how one (or two if you count both ends) solder connection on an interconnect can have any noticeable sound effect, considering there are a zillion solder connections on all the components in the signal path. Is it crystal structure or small partial diode effect between each component in the soldered connection or just the fact that the signal is going through these different metals in the junction? Or is it the fact that the signal in an interconnect is so small (v & a) which makes it much more sensitive to small differences in construction?

Another puzzle is inside your amp etc everything is connected together either by wires of some sort or pcb track. How then can an interconnect constructed differently have any effect on the final sound? Granted, the length of an interconnect is going to be longer than the wires inside the boxes.
Clearly it does but I don't know the physics.

Looking forward to more details of this ribbon cable.
 
GordonM said:
Another puzzle is inside your amp etc everything is connected together either by wires of some sort or pcb track. How then can an interconnect constructed differently have any effect on the final sound? Granted, the length of an interconnect is going to be longer than the wires inside the boxes.
Click to expand...
Are you assuming that all those wires, tracks and connections inside the amp don't effect the sound?
 
Season 1 Episode 1: Cable selection.

Spoiler alert: This was actually not an easy one to write, because I don’t consider it a very interesting thing to compose, and also because I am keen to get to the next episode, regarding designing my own plugs – but I don’t think the plug episode would make much sense unless I first shared the journey to foil cables, which became a key driver for designing my own plugs, so apologies if this post is not the most interesting – I hope to make amends on the next one……

My first attempt at DIY interconnects used Duelund multistrand copper-in-oil, trying different gage to see if they sounded different (they did ) and to see if the same gage works equally well between different pieces of kit (they didn’t ☹)

I ended up with various gages between different bits of kit, and then tried speaker cables, using multiple lengths per channel (a real pain as my speakers are bi-wired and have external x-overs, so needed 8 lengths in total, and I ended up a lots of cables)

It sounded ok, and certainly good value for money compared to the audionote they replaced, but never engaged me as much, so not a total success, but now had a DIY itch to scratch, so I read more on cables, and was also minded that Tom Evans, who designed my amps, had recommended flat speaker cables

Mundorf flat cables looked ideal to try – the copper ones are cheap, and there is the option to later upgrade to more exotic silver-based ones. The outcome:
· Sounded really great
· Looked really bad
No, I mean really bad. My first set was bodged into some connectors and used kapton tape as an insulator.cover. Using a combo of heatshrink & black plastic sleeving I managed to get them to look presentable, but these are never really going to look quite as nice as a well finished set of coax cables

In trying to make the speaker cables look more presentable I tried laying them on top of each other, which certainly made them less intrusive-looking, but I also thought they sounded a little better – was I imagining it? I tried the same with the interconnects, but that made them sound a little worse. I will explore configurations and gage in a later episode

So – things were getting better - I had some bad looking but good sounding cables ( I now thought these were at good as my audionote). But….i really could not live with the connectors, and spent ages researching to see if anyone made any that were designed for flat cable, but found none – however, what I did find was a foreign company who sold ready-made flat cables using their own connectors, and they also sold some items for the DIY community, but unfortunately NOT the connectors

So now my path was clear:
· In the pilot episode I shared my concerns about RCA PLUGS
· In this episode you had the boring summary of how I ended up with foils as my choice
The next episode will look into designing my own RCA plugs and the resulting 3D design, and episode 4 will share show me building a set to go between phono stage & pre-amp
 
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