Topic: I just made these....

[1st set only]

http://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/triple_t_e.html

and they are freaking amazing!

I only have a pic of the room i will post some pics of the cables later

[jpschust]

what i would be curious about is the shielding capabilities of the cable.  Cat5 isnt thought of as the highest shielding cable in the world, though cheap speaker cable isnt either.  

[1st set only]

hey there blake,
they only cost 14 bucks to make minus the banana clips.
I think you should go out and give it a try.

[jpschust]

im totally not knocking it, im just curious about the shielding aspect of them

[1st set only]

didn say you were dude.
what are you worried/curious about the cable being sheilded from?

[1st set only]

what I did was make three pairs  braid those I stripped about 5" of the outer sheath. the I paired the coloured wires and then the striped. this is my red and black I terminated one end with bananas and then one with pins.

I haven heard any weird noise. I wouldnt know what to look for either though.

All that I know is the bass is sooo tight now. not boomy at all.

to all those that plan on doing this....

start the braid from the middle and work your way out. this way you will have less cable to manage.

[jpschust]

ive got enough cat 5 lying around to network the house 10 times over, i will give it a shot and do some comparisons with what ive got :-)  +T

[Craig T]

im totally not knocking it, im just curious about the shielding aspect of them

Doesn't the braiding help reject RF noise?  There are a lot of very expensive speaker cables out there that don't use sheilding.

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

Yes, the braiding helps.  Look at like Kimber cables, they are braided and use no shielding.  There are a few CAT5 recipes floating around.  Chris VenHaus recipe is pretty popular.  


+T for having the patience to strip all those little wires.


Edit:  BTW, almost everything I read about those cables mentioned that they take a few hundred hours to break in and then they sound even better.

[1st set only]

dunno bout a hundred hours
they sound good on the first go!

If you dont have one already you will need a stripper that does 24 gauge.

also I would recomend solid core Cat5

[Nick Culbreth]

this thread inspired me to sit down and make a pair of these to replace my crappy speaker cables.  i haven't had a chance to listen to it a whole lot but it sounds like a layer of mud was taken off of the music, the difference is most noticeable in the bass.  i'll have to admit i wasn't expecting cables to make much of a difference, boy was i wrong.  looks like the next project will be making my own interconnects and maybe some power cables.  

[1st set only]

thank you I couldnt agree more.
isnt it cool making something yerself and saving a bunch of money?

[jpschust]

i read an interesting article about break in on cables, basically that time is less for the cable and more for your ears to attenuate to the sound of the cable.  

[jpschust]

additionally thats up for debate

[1st set only]

chet atkins diet, funny
my dad pummled chet atkins into my head as a kid.

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

there are some classic exchanges on audioasylum about cable burnin.  I agree some of it is becoming accustomed to the sound, but I also buy the explanation that cable burnin is about the capacitance of the cable and build up of residual charge in the dialectric.  I read some postings where someone did a blind test using cooked and new cables and they could tell a difference.  YMMV


When you guys get ready to make interconnects, google for a cable recipe that uses packing tape and magnet wire.  Basicly you just run two parallel strands of magnet wire sandwiched between two pieces of packing tape.  They are super cheap, very easy to make and get really high praise from people who reported results.  There is a version that uses silver wire if you are into that.  

They are not shielded, so if you have alot of RFI you may not like them.  

[Willie T.]

start the braid from the middle and work your way out. this way you will have less cable to manage.

I have put in about 15 hours already and this little tip helps alot.  +T

[1st set only]

yep i wish i new that tip prior to making mine

[Willie T.]

Well, I finished the cables a few days back and i have let them burn-in for about two days.  But the first listen was amazing, much better than the monster cable I had.  The bass is so much deeper and tight , the mids were crisp and clear, and the highs are airy.  It's amazing what a difference cables make (I would never have imagined such a big change).  

Construction took about 25 hours, $25 (minus the bananas).
I started with 10 foot lengths that were ~9ft when finished.



http://www.venhaus1.com/diycatfivecables.html

[dklein]

Interesting thread.  You won't need to worry to much about shielding because as speaker cables, the signal level is not passing through any gain stages (where RF might get amplified).

It would take some crazy levels of RF to produce a sound on a speaker without amplification!