Budget cables?

[bobhayes]

I've just got my first horn project enclosures finished and am looking for budget wiring suggestions.
I'm driving 5 inch full range from 10w/ch home made tube amp.
They're currently in test guise using 18swg enamelled copper wire to connect them and so far thet sound great! I was thinking of winding up a few different size enamelled wires for bass and treble, Maybe 5x30 swg wrapped over the 18swg.
I read somewhere that higher frequency signals tend to travel nearer to the surface of the wire?
Anyone?

[SY]

Here's something that has worked very, very well for me. It's even become a bit of an underground craze. Get a length of outdoor extension cable- here in the US it's normally bright orange. You want something in the 12 gauge range. Cut the plug and socket off, strip back the wires at the ends and let 'er rip.

And you can spend the money you saved by not getting sucked into more expensive stuff on CDs or concert tickets.

[rkc7]

If you want the 3 x 12ga wire used in extension cords, go to Lowe's, they sell it for $.68/foot in black or yellow(which might be more). Or you can buy it from www.PartsExpress.com for $9.80 for 25', and better deals on more, as well as a variety of gauges, 2, 3 or 4 conductor.

[HiSPL]

You could encase them in black techflex and put some fancy terminals on each end and fool all your friends into thinking you spent thousands on Cap'n Fancypants cables....

[random_id]

After reading a lot about DIY cables, I decided to make my own.
14 gauge Romex. Sure, its not that flexible...but its cheap. It also sounded a lot better than the other wires I had (two different long lengths of lamp cord, both wrapped in nice neat coils to make the wife happy.....sometimes, I just don't think).

Anyhow.... I think the wire thing is hype. I do think equal length is important, and I do think the Romex works well.

[rkc7]

Oh yeah... in England, I don't know where you could buy that, though. Probably in any large chain hardware store.

[TheoM]

I used to be skeptical of differences in speaker wire. I still am skeptical of differences people claim to hear between extremely expensive and somewhat expensive wire. My theory is that changing out the wire cleans the terminals, so everybody likes the wire they last tried. However.....

I recently bought some 10ga horizan megaflex ,which is cheap - like 50 cents a foot. I replaced the garden variety 12 ga plenum wire with the megaflex and the whole thing bloomed. Big difference.

I moved it back to the other cable to check if I had simply cleaned the terminals and this test confirmed that the megaflex was better.

Anyway - Horizan megaflex 10 ga. You can get it cheap. I have ribbon tweeters so I can hear differences clearly, but anyone could have heard this difference on any decent speaker.

[planet10]

Originally posted by SY
a length of outdoor extension cable-... in the 12 gauge range

At the other extreme, try a single pair -- untwisted -- out of a piece of solid core CAT 5 ethernet cable (2 kinds -- one with PVC the other with teflon). If you can find scaps it ends up costing zero $. If you like that you can get a spool of 30-33 guage magnet wire & try a pr of those (just leave the two wires in a "cloud").

dave

[SY]

And, of course, if you like playing with inductance versus capacitance, there's the Bob Pease special: ribbon cable.

[lopan]

multiple individually insulated wires are the best way to go. I used 22 gauge OFPC teflon coated wire. 20 wires twisted into 10 pairs one for nuetral and one for hot so mark them otherwise you will lose track. these 10 pairs are then twisted together. seperate and gather the ends and terminate. This style greatly reduces wire inductance by better tan a factor of ten and greatly increases surface area important for tweeters and reduces frequency dependent phase shift in the wire by limiting current depth. finish up as you wish