Years ago I bought XLO and Audioquest RCAs. I also made a few pairs using OCC pure silver wire. Guess the snake oil got me. Now I need two 8ft RCAs and remembered I have lots of CAT 5E. So, I looked up its spec. and it states it must user pure copper wires and capacitance at 800 Hz is 52pF/m, so that would be about 17 Hz pF/ft. Seems like that might make a good RCA cable. I'd terminate it with Eichmann silver bullets that I also bought while under the snake oil spell. All thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks
Thanks
No shield + 8ft RCA's will likely not end well. But try it and see if you like it. My experience with similar DIY cable (silver wire) is at first it's like "Wow, so much detail and treble" and then after a while it's lil "What's that hum? Why is everything not coherent". Shield is there for a reason although in your system and situation you might not need it.
I made a 6' pair years ago, with cheap connectors. Nothing as fancy as Eichmanns, or whatever they are calling them now. They are still in service between my phono and preamp. The hardest part is extracting the twisted pairs from the CAT 5 bundle.
jeff
jeff
if you want a nice DIY cable that's shielded try Belden 89207. Sounds great. Can be used balanced or unbalanced with rca.
Cat 5 is a low impedance cable, around 100ohms if I remember correctly. Some consumer HiFi units have quite high output impedance which make such cable unsuitable for interconnects. A longer length with prove lossy and as said above prone to hum pick up.
I just remembered that, about 15 years ago, I bought 50 feet of Belden 1192A so I'll use that for the RCAs. Its capacitance is 57.4pF/ft in quad configurations so I'm thinking of only using two conductors, which will reduce capacitance to 39pF/ft. Does that make sense?
Cat 5 makes for V good IC or most everything else wirings. Can use multiple pairs as inbuilt 'shieldings' or Use 3 wires .
The Cat 5's inherent twisting is V effective.
Non iligitimi carborundum 😉
The Cat 5's inherent twisting is V effective.
Non iligitimi carborundum 😉
It makes sense if the IC is for a turntable to phono stage where low capacitance is desired. Otherwise it probably isn't going to make much difference.
jeff
My CAT5e has four conductors, so two pairs and it is labeled UTP and I believe that means untwisted pair. Does that mean that none of the conductors are twisted? Seems that may be a downside.
I look up the CAT5 spec. and it states UTP standards for untwisted pair, not unshielded. My cable is marked CAT5e 2PR and when I cut off the connector there only four conductors. The spec. also states CAT5 cables can have from two pairs to 100 pairs.
For analog signals you can use most any crazy thing you like with sometimes differing results. A good quality shielded cable tends to produce the most reliable and best sounding result in all applications. Differ from that and it's possible YMMV. Most of my rig uses Belden 89259 for the interconnect and I've been pleased with its sound and reliability.
For digital RCA signals the cable needs to be 75 ohm. Since DIY allows you to do crazy things that confound your friends all my digital coax connections have had the RCA jacks on the components swapped for BNC with corresponding cables made again from Belden 89259.
For digital RCA signals the cable needs to be 75 ohm. Since DIY allows you to do crazy things that confound your friends all my digital coax connections have had the RCA jacks on the components swapped for BNC with corresponding cables made again from Belden 89259.
I'm 76 years old and very happy with my systems. So, I have a lot of good stuff I collected over the years that I will be putting on ebay. If cheap CAT5 interconnects would work for my Velodyne HGS10bg subwoofer, I could include my ft50 of Belden 1192A cable. That and many other items have been collecting dust for many years.
Okay, so if one keeps an 8-strand CAT5 cable bundled together, how does one wire the twisted pairs? Two pair in parallel for positive, two pair for negative, or one of each pair for positive, and one of each pair for negative?
Interesting question and reminds me that Belden 1192a star quad cable data sheet specifies what wires should be paired. The four 1192a conductors are tightly twisted but not as separate pairs.
Use the solid colors as positive and the striped corresponding colors as ground. You can join two solids and two corresponding stripes to make one rca cable. Total of four conductors per rca cable. The twisted pairs should be maintained to make the wire do its job. If you use Orange plus Orange/white as positive and Green plus Green/white as negative you lose the advantage of twisted cables. You obviously have no shielding but if you are ok with that go for it. Cat5 works better as shorter speaker wiring than interconnects.