A New Interconnect Design

[palmito]

Originally Posted by beau2317

Thanks for the review. Remind me what wire you are using again?

I made two sets - one with palladium wire, the other with mundorf gold/silver.

Initially I preferred the palladium, but after some time I found it a touch too bright, and now I prefer the gold/silver wires.

I'm using 22awg pure silver wire I got from myrontoback.com. The coax is Monster cables RG-6 with copper shield. I didn't re-use the mylar tape, instead I used a 3m mylar tape shield (it's a little thicker).

I will look at the Mundorf gold/silver, had not considered it before.

I'm very happy with the sound so far.

[beau2317]

You can get mundorf gold/silver on ebay. Try here. You can write to the auction owner and he can make auction for however much you need, with Buy Now facility. He also sells teflon tubing that's useful for using at the ends of the interconnect. But this wire is also good for rewiring the inside of electronics, and the teflon tube is ideal for that..

Actually I made some with pure silver as well, but the mundorf was a bit better. (Not a huge amount).

But it's pleasing that these cables hold up so well against $1200 cables.

[jameshillj]

Thanks Bob for this project.

I finally got my "A into gear" and made up a couple of these fancy IC things - actually, I stripped down a pair of old silver ICs in teflon sleeves (just the 2 conductors) and got inspired from the days of doing cotton ICs!

What I did was run a solid copper wire thru the centre of 5mm woven cotton sleeve (left over from speaker wires) and then spiral wrapped the 2 silver conductor wires around the soft cotton (as per normal assembly) and added the layer of yellow (for gas fittings) Teflon over that at 50% overlap (effectively giving 2 thickness of teflon) - so far "no problemo"!.

Then I splurged a couple of thin coats of Liquid Latex on top of the Teflon that made it easy to stick down the Ali skin (first sheild) and then finished off the assembly as per Bob's instructions - not too happy with the crap outer expanding sleeve but it'll do for now.

Have ran them on the system for about 40 hrs now and the "sound" is starting to come together 'rather nicely indeed' without any bias voltage applied yet. These are quite different to the basic ones that I stripped down - defenitely clearer sound altho the treble hasn't come together properly yet - a whole lot more bass, becoming quite clean now!

No idea why this radical change as it has the same silver wire and plugs - no bias voltage yet.

The the first ones were a bit rough finished (as expected) so I did another pair with some #25 silver from our local Silver manufacturers and had it well annealed and polished (the annealing makes quite a bit of a difference, particularly the top end - not quite sure about the polishing, but why not, eh!)

This time, I fed a thin 1mm teflon tube thru the centre of the same cotton sleeve and then ran a multistrand bare copper (250strand, 50 micron) thru this Teflon centretube for a more flexible IC - then made up the rest of it like the first pair with the latex and so on - don't know if it's going to make any difference and I guess we'll find out -breakin time is about 60 or so hours usually ....

Got all sorts of batteries including 30 of those 3volt button things! (2025 size!) Initially I'll just make the standard 4 x 9 volt block box (+/-18V) and add the caps and earth point.

Put in a bid for the 0.5mm Mundorf Silver/Gold that Bob mentioned and someone pipped me at $51! Will try the next one and/or will ask vendor for 'best price" - he's also got some 5 and 10mm dark sleeve that I might try.

The phono plugs seem to need the large size to fit all the wires, sleeve and heatshrink end wraps - anyone have suggestions?
The basic Neutrix just aren't big enough and the Supremes are a real pain to find - some Yarbos from "vt4c" in HK?

My initial impressions without any bias is that the Teflon wrapping way of making the ICs seem clearer and suprisingly far better bass! Never had green (unbroken) silver ICs with any bass before!

Good one Bob, Thanks for posting up your project and have great hopes for the next lot of ICs.

[beau2317]

Just send a message to the vendor of the wire and he will do a private deal with you. He's reliable - I can vouch for him.

So you haven't put the batteries one yet? Wow, you are in for a surprise if you haven't..

Thanks for the report!

[jameshillj]

Yeah, if I don't get the next offering (2 days to go) I'll ask for 20 metres and try it as short speaker wires, too! (for efficient Coral beta 8 speakers).

Then will knock up a cotton sleeve based one and compare it to a basic teflon centre to see if any difference.

If you haven't tried one of the various versions of the Lightspeed Vol Control, I suggest you see if there's one available near you - if not, there are quite a few here and possibly I can send a loaner over to try - amazing things, particularly in front of the Aikido.

I've found that coating the "naked" Russian teflon caps (0.2uF) with plumbers Silicon (no acetone version) and wrapeed in 3mm thick medium density Neoprene is a really good result, better than the 'latex' and the beeswax (not yet melted in preamp but, ....)

... will let you know when ICs settle down

[beau2317]

Hi James

Yes I know about lightspeed. I got into an argument with the "designer" of it for pointing out that his design was actually taken directly from the website of the LDR manufacturer.

I use a Buffalo III and that has a built in digital volume control that has enough bandwidth (something like 48 bit internal arithmetic) so gives an accurate control. So much better than any other volume control I've tried.

I think most of the gain with the russian teflons is in removing the steel case. Just about anything you do after that will be better. They make great caps, but you can also overdo them if you use too many.

[jameshillj]

Yeah, that's the origins of George's unit - still, he goes to an enormous amount of trouble to match those damn LDRs and they do works pretty well - I think that the Warpspeed has "less of any sound at all", but this might just be my biased opinion.

Buffalo dac - Sabre 9018? Legato o/p stage - shunt regs, etc - sophisticated system.

I'm still playing around with NOS 1541A - long way to go yet.

Talking about our favourite russian sources, I got a reel of some quite old Isabellenhutte Manganin wire from over there awhile back, and it makes the most analogue resistors I have heard, including the comparison to the Isotan wire ones that sound quite similar to the TC foil resistors, those expensive little items - Interesting, eh.

[beau2317]

I built an LDR volume control for mty friend's aikido, and it works pretty well. But it was no better than a relay switched resistor ladder on my other aikido preamp (we could try them back to back).

My Buffallo is described here

I put a tube output stage onto a Buffalo II board. Also used a Teddy Super Regulator to power the BIII board (which has 4 shut regs onboard).

It sounds pretty good. I used to have a DDDAC, 60 chip NOS 1543, and that was a good sound, but the new DAC is much better. Also the digital volume control means that I don't need any physical volume control. Comparing it to an actual volume control show you just how bad they sound - I was surprised. I had it in circuit with a preamp and I could either use the preamp control and put the DAC at full, or use the DAC volume control and put the preamp on full. It was easy to see that the digital volume control was a lot better.

As for resistors, one thing I found on the DAC (which is on that thread in more detail) was that some NeoOhm precision wirewounds sounded better than Vishay bulk foils in the critical IV load resistor (50ohms)

[jameshillj]

Yeah, there's nothing forgiving about the Isotan/Bulk foil especially at that I/V stage - I haven't tried the NeoOhms at all - will do, thanks.

Trouble with Volume Pots - years ago, we thought we were onto a good thing when we used some of those Allan Bradley conductive plastic units that were fitted to the then "best desks" (pro audio) but discrete steppers were better back then too!
I got one of John's clunkie volume switcher units with one of the Aikido kits - it's not too bad actually, but is very dependent on the type of resistors.

... bed time, yawning!

[jameshillj]

Okay, the ICs finally settled down without any battery bias - these have used the same 0.5mm silver wire and the same phono plugs from the previous interconnects and have been assembled with a cotton centre instead of the Teflon coax but the rest is as per Bob's method.

I am really quite surprised that the different way of assembling the ICs would make such a difference - there is much better overall detail and all the other things mentioned above, including far cleaner bass and absolutely no "edge" at all without loss of treble - used the h/phones to make sure - the balance, or the sound, is quite different.

I was also a bit suprpised at the long time it has taken for these ICs to settle and for some masking in the low mids to go, and some bass bloom to clear up - that took about 8 days (continuous use).

Then I plugged in the +/- 21 volts (Sat) and waited to hear what would happen - well, not much for about a day and then the previous good sound just got a bit weird, as tho there was phase changes going on across the freq response - the sound has now slowly started to come together again, tonight and the improvement in detail and the background is quite obvious - a bit more treble this time without losing any of the bass punch - I think better things to come in a few days.

What a strange exercise - reminds me a bit about the dramas we had with the black gate caps, years ago!

Anyway, Yes to Bob's U-beaut diy battery biased ICs - thanks Bob.

I just received the Mundorf Silver/gold wire and the plugs are on the way so it'll be interesting how these new ones will sound like.