Hi everyone.
(Just to be clear right at the start of this thread, in order to save you a lot of reading, the jumper cables that I purchased for this project were not actually solid copper as I initially thought. They were copper plated aluminum. I still use a set as back up, but I would recommend making sure that the jumper cables that you use are all copper. These are inevitably more expensive than the cheap copper plated aluminum ones I accidentally purchased)
I was at a Walmart yesterday and noticed that they had several sets of car jumper cables for sale. One set was around $35, was 20 feet long, and made out of 4 gauge stranded copper wire. The cable is very flexible for such a thick gauge.
A few months back I picked up two pairs of 6 gauge jumper cables on sale at Home Depot for under $16 each, and made two pairs of 16 foot speaker cables using them and a few sets of nice banana plugs I bought at an auction. I'm kind of peeved because I didn't know that the 4 gauge was available. But now you know. I'm not a huge believer in the high end cable thing, but read online that many swear by super thick cables, so I gave it a go. Mine cost about $70 all in, and they seem to sound better than the 12 gauge standard speaker wire I had before. Perhaps it's my imagination, as I did not conduct a double blind test, and they are probably far too inexpensive to actually sound good.
Anyway, I cut the clips off, put the banana plug in a vice, put the stripped end of the wire into the banana plug, and heated the assembly with an aggressive torch style BBQ lighter until solder would flow into it. A little shrink wrap, and done. This wire is the cheapest and definitely the most flexible of this gauge that I have seen in my casual shopping. It's colour coded red and black and looks impressive as is, but if you put a sleeve on it it could look like a (very thick) commercially made product. Attached are a few photos to give you an idea of what the 6 gauge looks like. The tubes next to it are 6P14-P, which are a bit bigger than 6BQ5. The 4 gauge is noticeably thicker. I'm not sure if this the best place to post this. Please let me know if it isn't. Here are the pics......
(Just to be clear right at the start of this thread, in order to save you a lot of reading, the jumper cables that I purchased for this project were not actually solid copper as I initially thought. They were copper plated aluminum. I still use a set as back up, but I would recommend making sure that the jumper cables that you use are all copper. These are inevitably more expensive than the cheap copper plated aluminum ones I accidentally purchased)
I was at a Walmart yesterday and noticed that they had several sets of car jumper cables for sale. One set was around $35, was 20 feet long, and made out of 4 gauge stranded copper wire. The cable is very flexible for such a thick gauge.
A few months back I picked up two pairs of 6 gauge jumper cables on sale at Home Depot for under $16 each, and made two pairs of 16 foot speaker cables using them and a few sets of nice banana plugs I bought at an auction. I'm kind of peeved because I didn't know that the 4 gauge was available. But now you know. I'm not a huge believer in the high end cable thing, but read online that many swear by super thick cables, so I gave it a go. Mine cost about $70 all in, and they seem to sound better than the 12 gauge standard speaker wire I had before. Perhaps it's my imagination, as I did not conduct a double blind test, and they are probably far too inexpensive to actually sound good.
Anyway, I cut the clips off, put the banana plug in a vice, put the stripped end of the wire into the banana plug, and heated the assembly with an aggressive torch style BBQ lighter until solder would flow into it. A little shrink wrap, and done. This wire is the cheapest and definitely the most flexible of this gauge that I have seen in my casual shopping. It's colour coded red and black and looks impressive as is, but if you put a sleeve on it it could look like a (very thick) commercially made product. Attached are a few photos to give you an idea of what the 6 gauge looks like. The tubes next to it are 6P14-P, which are a bit bigger than 6BQ5. The 4 gauge is noticeably thicker. I'm not sure if this the best place to post this. Please let me know if it isn't. Here are the pics......
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IIRC Martin DeWulf of Bound for Sound used 6AWG wire from Lowes or Home Depot and liked the results. Very heavy gauge wire will probably have a higher self-inductance so you may (may) get a small attenuation in the HF; whether it's audible or not YMMV. In most cases that kind of gauge wire though will be completely unnecessary as far as voltage drop is concerned.
I bet the expectation bias is very powerful when you spend $10000 on a set of speaker cables. Especially after you have read a bunch of glowing reviews written by people who also have the expectation bias affecting them. Reviews that are not based on double blind assessments, and often comparing components heard over a long period of time. I was at a high end audio store a couple of months ago to listen to some DACs, and to hear some high end equipment to give myself an idea of how I'm doing with my builds. When I walked in there was a customer listening to what amounted to $65000 worth of components. The sales people were doing the ooh and awe thing. It sounded mediocre to me. No sense of being there at the performance at all. Lots of expectation of great sound and lots of reinforcement of this expectation from the sales people though.
That's what I was thinking. Maybe too much oxygen. However, there is a truckload of copper. Do you think the electricity will find its way through all the nasty oxygen because there is so much copper there as well? Maybe if I parallel a few sets of the four gauge cables it will help?
IIRC Martin DeWulf of Bound for Sound used 6AWG wire from Lowes or Home Depot and liked the results. Very heavy gauge wire will probably have a higher self-inductance so you may (may) get a small attenuation in the HF; whether it's audible or not YMMV. In most cases that kind of gauge wire though will be completely unnecessary as far as voltage drop is concerned.
Dr Moose, please check your email accounts
Fred Davis did some tests of speaker wire 20+ years ago. One of the cables tested was either jumper cables or welding wire. It had appreciable inductance. The conclusion I came to back then was that 12ga zip cord is a pretty good size compromise for inductance, capacitance and resistance.
A quick google found this:
https://acmebass.com/archive_files/...esting_spkr_cables_for_audibility_07-1993.pdf
A quick google found this:
https://acmebass.com/archive_files/...esting_spkr_cables_for_audibility_07-1993.pdf
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