No you got me wrong. I don't recommend to place + and - one close to each other , I always space them at least 1-2 cm and most often just put them far apart loosely on the carpet. As said there are much better designs for DIY but more costly and more complicated but belive me unwined Alpha Core ribbon coil used as speaker cable will give 5 times better results than any crappy CAT5 cables out there. Those computer net cables are really crap to use in audio. You can also custom order the ribbons from Alpha Core to any width and thickness you want, insulated both sides and enclosed by polyester tape. If you want even better butique results Mundorf sells high quality copper ribbons, silver ribbons and silver/gold ribbons (also solid core wires of the same mentioned combinations). I have been there and done that with Cat5 cables tried numerous combinations and some 30+ suppliers and it's always the crap. I will tell you where the ideas of using it comes from. It comes from a cheap trick that some industrial wires in some combination will perform better then some basic audiophile targeted wires, and in fact in many cases it is true. And in fact some of CAT5 cables might perform better than some audiophile targeted but very basic and cheap wires. In fact this is what cable companies use for cheap low lever and also for mid level cables, they just most often jacket some industrial wires that are quite fine in their own jacket. But in my book amongs cheap tricks the Cat5 trick is less succesful and really crap. This trick really mostly works for less "cable expirenced" DIY audiophiles. Almost any cheap trick like he Alpha Core coils trick mention above is better than Cat5 trick. My another 5 cents.
Cheers
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"I think current handling capability might possibly be a little more important than any of those measurements. Maybe measure the voltage drop of the Cat5 wire with 8 amps flowing through it for a useful measurement"
Why at 8 amps? You are referring to the wire's resistance, which is essentially independent of test current i.e. it can be measured with a DVM!
Google gives approx 40 ohms/ Km (for 22swg), which is, of course 40mR/meter. With all the multistrand and weaving going on, the total R for a typical domestic cable is easily <0.1R.
I am not sure how you would plan to overload that!
Why at 8 amps? You are referring to the wire's resistance, which is essentially independent of test current i.e. it can be measured with a DVM!
Google gives approx 40 ohms/ Km (for 22swg), which is, of course 40mR/meter. With all the multistrand and weaving going on, the total R for a typical domestic cable is easily <0.1R.
I am not sure how you would plan to overload that!
So you don't worry about RF pickup on the antenna on your carpet? That at least is measurable...
No i mostly don't. Though in my very sophisticated designs the + and - are always spaced but all screened in quite sophisticated not capacitance cousing way.
But in general RF pick up very rarely is the problem.
Kind Regards
I said 8 amps (that's current, not resistance) just as a number off the top of my head. A speaker wire will need to carry much more than that in many home stereo applications.
Look at a wire ampacity chart sometime and see if you can find resistance on it anywhere. Now I see why people get sucked into this nonsense.
22 gauge wire can carry a maximum or 2 amps. If your amp doesn't overload that get a better amp. Bundle it up and parallel 20 runs of it and you might get close to enough current capacity after all the required derating.
For a real world test, hook it up and crank up the stereo for a while. Then see how warm it gets.
Enlighten me then. Show me how a 22 gauge wire can carry high current. Show me a wire ampacity chart that mentions resistance.
The effect of resistance isn't (within reason!) heating, it's change of speaker frequency response. See the classic papers from Fred Davis and Richard Greiner in the late '70s and early '80s.
In general, I find any basic LRC measurements of the cables is pointless accept maybe for the fact that some amplifiers will be unstable with some high capacitance cable I find absolutely no correlation with the sound percived. Most probably some very advanced spectra measurements should be use to give any correlation with percived sound (someone who could find this correlation would be also needed).
As to the screening in my expirence a typical bad screening applied directly to conductors and cousing capacitance rise is most often worse than no screening. But in the properly applied and multilayer efficent screening the actual screening is only part of the gain the other part is in sound quality, low level signal, information and backround that one gains. So in my opinion in high quality audio cables screening in signal and power cable but maybe also in speaker cables is needed.
As to the power and and requirements I doubt simple CAT 5 cable will be not enough. I belive in most cases the cross section of Cat5 will be more than good.
>billshurv
Why should I describe anything more sophisticated while no one even seem to want to hear that simple unwined Alpha Core ribbon coil is 5 times better as the speaker cable than any Cat5 cables you need to spend 2 hours for soldering? I'm not mentioning it would be too expensive to 99% of this forum to try.
As to the screening in my expirence a typical bad screening applied directly to conductors and cousing capacitance rise is most often worse than no screening. But in the properly applied and multilayer efficent screening the actual screening is only part of the gain the other part is in sound quality, low level signal, information and backround that one gains. So in my opinion in high quality audio cables screening in signal and power cable but maybe also in speaker cables is needed.
As to the power and and requirements I doubt simple CAT 5 cable will be not enough. I belive in most cases the cross section of Cat5 will be more than good.
>billshurv
Why should I describe anything more sophisticated while no one even seem to want to hear that simple unwined Alpha Core ribbon coil is 5 times better as the speaker cable than any Cat5 cables you need to spend 2 hours for soldering? I'm not mentioning it would be too expensive to 99% of this forum to try.
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That's not the issue with CAT5 except for a very few pathological situations. In 50 years of playing seriously with audio, I've experienced warm speaker cables exactly zero times.
The closer they are, the less the inductance. More distance, more inductance. Somehow you've gotten it backward...
Sure becouse you as many others have a formula that low inductance, low resistance and low capacitance is the must for a good cable. The more I know and expirence th less I think it is so obvious and simple. Not considering the fact the most often one is the trade of for another.
Well mainly because otherwise you are considered full of words and nothing else. People who really have a better way generally like to share that. Measurements help credibility as filters out those who have put some science into it rather than mumbo jumbo.
You are of course free to not share, tell us all you have a better way and we are not worthy..
It actually happens all the time in car audio. I've seen junk undersize wire get pretty warm in home audio when it's being run hard too. That wire usually goes straight into the trash. My issue with a lot of these "audiophile" wires is actually the lack of proper engineering. If the wire is rated to carry the power you are going to put through it, it's all good. Up here in Canada we have CEC. There's pretty much the same standards that apply all over the world. When someone tells me a wire can handle high current just because it's resistance is low doesn't really show me they know what they are talking about.
P = I2R. And it's dissipated over a lot of surface area. Proportional to R. 4 pair CAT5 can handle about 2.3A- if you need more, you can use CAT5 with more pairs- I have some 50 pair cables sitting unused in my lab, just in case.
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