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Mains cable for Loudspeakers

Isobarik said:
I'm talking about twin and earth cables as used in house wiring. I don't think Acoustic Revive Triple C and DNM Reson were available then, but I'm probably wrong. I'm referring to the 70's and 80's.
Some weird stuff going on then! A friend of mine use to use 10mm twin and earth for speaker cable? It sounded OK to me.

I personally used 16 mm welding cable!😁 'joke!'
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In the '70's & 80's I used white flexible 2 core mains cable (2.5mm, 25 Amp) between my Quad 303 and different iterations of B & W DM70 speakers.
I read later, that Peter Walker (Quad) had arrived at a demonstration to find that there weren't any specific 'loudspeaker' cables available, and had therefore sent someone out to buy something suitable, which turned out to be the 'orange' 2 core cable normally used for 'lawnmowers'.
Regards
Mike K.
 
chiily said:
I use MOGAMI Superflexible coax studio speaker cable (3082) for my EL57s. It's inductance is low at 0.4µH/m. It sounds pretty good to me.
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The UBYTE 2 is a pain to make in parts needing another pair of hands, have tried borrowed Mogami, however the UBYTE 2 is in my situation an improvement 3 twists per meter around each other was indicated I did 4 turns per meter I also left the outer sheath on since half the cable is solid core connected to the stranded/sheet copper foil outer screen I subsequently wrapped each assembled cable with copper foil as a faradic cage to prevent picking up the severe RFI/EMI I suffer.

https://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/ubyte2e.html (how to make)

https://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/spkcbl_e.html (Theory explained & tested)
 
Big John said:
The UBYTE 2 is a pain to make in parts needing another pair of hands, have tried borrowed Mogami, however the UBYTE 2 is in my situation an improvement 3 twists per meter around each other was indicated I did 4 turns per meter I also left the outer sheath on since half the cable is solid core connected to the stranded/sheet copper foil outer screen I subsequently wrapped each assembled cable with copper foil as a faradic cage to prevent picking up the severe RFI/EMI I suffer.

https://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/ubyte2e.html (how to make)

https://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/spkcbl_e.html (Theory explained & tested)
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I've demo'ed Mogami XLR 9m at £100 versus fancy £2k 3m cable to a dealer and they were stunned at how there was so little difference.
We all (three of us) thought the Mogami was clearer and only very slightly bass shy.
 
I used to use 2.5mm twin & earth years ago (20 odd?), it sounded different to the generic multi strand of the time (tighter clearer bass if I remember right) awkward to route and terminate and looked horrible.
Try grounding the central earth wire, that sounds different too 😀.

These days I just use Supra Rondo, it seems fine 👍.
 
My experience with solid core cables including cat5 is that they are a band pass filtering the bass and treble which can make some systems sound better, but some fat stranded cable will always make a good system sound better.

Pete
 
Pete MB&D said:
My experience with solid core cables including cat5 is that they are a band pass filtering the bass and treble which can make some systems sound better, but some fat stranded cable will always make a good system sound better.

Pete
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And my experience, Pete is that solid-core spkr cables have much more resolution than stranded cable. 😮 So stranded cable makes a good system sound worse!

Maybe your experience with Cat5 is simply not using enough strands to make up a reasonable overall cross-sectional area?
 
andyr said:
Solid-core is the reason yours sound so good! :)

But 1.5mm^2 solid-core is still 1.4mm in diameter. I suggest you will get even better-sounding spkr cable by using solid-core Cat5/5e twisted pairs - which are only 24g (so 0.5mm in diam). Use the striped wire in each pair for '-ve' and the solid-colour wire for '+ve' - and 8 wires for each (so a total of 2x 'jackets' to each spkr). The result is you get a spkr cable with very low inductance - much lower than the side-by-side arrangement of the lighting cable. Providing the length is not more than about 4m ... your amp shouldn't have any problem with the cable's capacitance.
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To a first approximation of hand-wave the ratio of the diameters of the two conductor (bundles) wrt their spacing will determine the inductance/metre. Using mulitstrand can alter the effects of skin-depth, depending on how the strands are arranged, etc.

The greater the series resistance and inductance, the larger the change in transfer function when loaded, depending on the speaker impedance vs frequency. Thus if you want to fiddle with the response, go for cables with relatively high inductance and/or resistance.

So depends on the extent to which you prefer fiddling with the response and changing it from what you'd get when having the amp *at* the speaker terminals and cables of length almost zero.
 
dalryc said:
Yes - sorry - I was talking about 220/240v cables.
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Mains cables used in the room are different to 'plug in' equipment are different to those in the house wiring from mains sockets back to the where the power enters the house. Leads in the room need to be flexible. (Details vary from country to country, naturally.)
 
andyr said:
And my experience, Pete is that solid-core spkr cables have much more resolution than stranded cable. 😮 So stranded cable makes a good system sound worse!

Maybe your experience with Cat5 is simply not using enough strands to make up a reasonable overall cross-sectional area?
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Were the stranded and nonstranded example of exactly the same guages? i.e. same effective conductor diameters and spacings and conductivites? If not, chances are - assuming the effect was real - then that could be what altered the response.
 

Mains cables for speakers are recommended by Kelvin from London as a money saving tip number 1
I admire this guys enthusiasm
 
By
andyr said:
And my experience, Pete is that solid-core spkr cables have much more resolution than stranded cable. 😮 So stranded cable makes a good system sound worse!

Maybe your experience with Cat5 is simply not using enough strands to make up a reasonable overall cross-sectional area?
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I used all the conductors in the cat5 it didn’t last a whole track it was terrible.

Pete
 
Mr Pig said:
But then it's not much cheaper than cheap speaker cable, so what's the point?
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A lot of cheap speaker cable is not copper, either aluminium or steel with a plating. Faking of power cables is much less common as power cables have legal requirements. Their copper purity is as good as most "audio" cables.
 
I’ve always fancied having a go with some 4mm LSOH twin and earth. Insulation is XLPE and the cores are made up of several solid core strands making up the 4mm rather than single core as per 2.5 so much more flexible. Can’t really see any cable bettering it, but I bought some Wireworld stuff as it looks tidier
 
Pete MB&D said:
By

I used all the conductors in the cat5 it didn’t last a whole track it was terrible.

Pete
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OK - so you used "all the conductors in the cat5". There are 8 conductors in a Cat5/52/6 ... jacket.

Did you:
* use 8 wires to each spkr? (So 4 wires for '+ve' and 4 wires for '-ve'.)
* or did you use 8 wires (ie. 1 jacket) for each of '+ve' and '-ve' terminals?

And how did you connect the individual wires?

To get the best from twisted pair cable, for spkr wires ... you need to use one wire from each tp for '+ve' - and the other wire for '-ve'. This gives the lowest inductance - which is good, for a spkr cable.
 
I did 4 runs of Cat5 so all 8 conductors in each cable.

Your method for recucing the inductance will increase the capactance which can cause some amplifiers to go unstable.

I replaced NACA5 2.5mm with 7 strands with 16mm 80 strands which made it sound so much better, not thin and all midrange like NACA5 and Cat5.

Pete
 
Pete MB&D said:
Your method for reducing the inductance will increase the capacitance which can cause some amplifiers to go unstable.
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Correct! 👍

But for 'normal' spkr cable lengths - 3 to 4 metres - most amplifiers should not have a problem.

You said: "I did 4 runs of Cat5 so all 8 conductors in each cable."

But as you (appear to have?) simply used one jacket to each spkr terminal (so 4 jackets in total) ... no wonder it sounded RS! 😮 (High inductance and low capacitance.)
 
Remember 39 strand, available at your local electronics shop? Cheap but good stuff, when the alternatives were bell wire (yuk!) and some manufacturers' in-house and pricey cable.
 
Duelund Coherent Audio DCA 12GA 600 VDC is meant for power cables but the conductors are exactly the same (same tinned copper/same gauge/same number of strands) as the speaker version. Only difference is that the speaker cable uses another mantle (oiled cotton). The one on the 600 VDC is actually better, more wear resistant. So I use that one as speaker cable…at half the price. (price difference must be the snake oil in the other one)
 
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