Interconnects - Magnet wire?

[gunalangingan]

Hi. I am about to purchase an Interconnect for my humble system. I found Onix Black Silver at USD150. Can anyone give me some suggestion regarding this product. I found little information about ONIX in the Internet.

Thank you.

[AndrewT]

$150 sounds about $120 too expensive.

[sonidos]

gtforme00,

Have you ever used Canare star-quad as an IC? The more I read about twisted pair, the more I want to try to build a pair from another manufacturer. I've seen some comments where Canare is high in capacitance.

I've bought Kimber, Van den Hul, etc. and I think I can get more bang for the buck rolling my own.

Can you drop me an email? I may be interested in a bit of your spare cable to try making a set of ICs. Thanks.

[analog_sa]

Originally posted by gunalangingan
I found little information about ONIX in the Internet.

Not a good sign. It may indeed be excellent but the resale value won't be good.

[olriley]

I made some DIY solid silver-in teflon interconnects (helix twisted pair for each channel), non shielded, plenty of guidance on the web, important to use 99.99% fine silver, cheap and easy, sound as good if not better than any commercial offering I've used so far. Regards - Oliver

[keantoken]

Perhaps I'm not current with the discussion at this point, but I have a comment regarding the consideration of different insulation materials for their dielectric constants.

I heard somewhere (pertaining to nonlinearity in capacitors) that insulators with higher dielectric constants usually have less linear characteristics. Teflon, having a low dielectric constant, would decrease phase shift/treble attenuation as well as being more linear, resulting in less distortion.

I've never done anything with cables, I'm just throwing this out there.

- keantoken

[sonidos]

olriley -

Thanks for the info. I found the info on the web. Does anyone know why 4 9's silver is preferred? Is this to reduce tarnishing? I seemed to have read that somewhere.

I had put together a simple attenuator circuit with Dale resistors, sealed relays, and silver wire. I decided to scrap it and salvaged the silver wire. However, when I was pulling out the wire, I noticed that when I pulled back the insulation, the wire had a deep blue tarnish. I went to my parts box and pulled out some unused silver scraps to compare and it was free of tarnish.

Any of you metal guys know what may have happened?

[olriley]

I don't know specifically but I guess its to do with reducing inclusions within the atomic structure of the metal, which could affect its electrical properites... it is reasonably cheap though, I used 0.315mm stuff. Quite soft and delicate. Blue tarnish something to do with application of heat from soldering??
Regards,
Oliver

[gtforme00]

I just saw this thread again, sorry I didn't respond sooner.

I have never tried any "brand" of cable, I just don't put that much importance on it. Not disparaging you for being interested, it is just not my thing.

I design and build SONAR transducers. The receive signals are on the order of microvolts and are operated in sometimes very electrically noisy environments. For this application we use the lowest capacitance cable we can find, but this is due to high frequency of the signal (50 to 800 kHz). There may be some benefit to higher capacitance if you are interested in filtering these high frequencies, but I don't see why you wouldn't just add bypass capacitors to achieve the same thing.

The cable I have available to me is by no means exotic. It is standard tinned copper wiring for the most part, and typically consists of two to four pair of individually twisted shielded wire pairs. The dielectric is probably PVC, though I could be mistaken. I have found that there is no set rule to which side of the shield (or both) should be grounded. It can be surprising the results of playing with the ground scheme.

In the audio world, this type of cable is seen as substandard, but it works great for me. My line of thought is that as long as you have good shielding and reliable termination, you have achieved everything that matters in the art of interconnects.

Regards,
David

[sonidos]

David,

Thanks for responding. I didn't find your remarks at all disparaging. I guess I came at this hobby from a different angle because I started reading Audio magazine in my teen years and kept seeing all those Monster Cable ads and I wasn't sure about how to roll my own.

But based on what I've read here, it seems the cable companies put tons of $$$ into marketing and I learn quite a bit from engineers on this site.

I'm not knocking what someone may hear with their $3000 set of speaker cables, but I'm on a budget with another kid on the way, so this seems the way to go and wean myself off of exotic cables and have more fun with this hobby.

-Javier