Favorite speaker wire?

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#42
Man, I can't belive this has slipped all the way to page 3 already.

I just finnished hooking up my USB dac this past week. It uses the dreaded teflon & silver wires. Actually they are teflon and silver coated copper. I used them on the ground leads only(just because they were a different color.) All the + are kapton & silver coated copper.

I'll be a sunofagun if the thing dosen't distort when moved or shaken by a loud/low passage. Now this may be shoddy soldering on my part as this is my first time doing anything like this, but this thread has me paranoid. Sy, can you describe the distortion you heard? Mine ranges from a crackly thump when set down while playing to a low scratchy crackling (think AM static) in the left channel only after a strong bass note or particularly dymanic phrase. This doesn't happen all that much. Maybe about 7% of total playing time. When it isn't going on, it sounds fantastic.

So what do you guys think? Rookie soldering or wire problems. The case isn't the final stop for this dac, so taking it all out and doing it again isn't a big deal. I just wanna know if I should just scrap the silver & teflon stuff when I re-case it.
 
#43
There are a great number of things I don't know, but I've never seen cable with different insulation for one leg than the other.

I have seen a clear zip cord with one copper colored lead and one silver colored lead. For this cable, it's not silver, it's tin plate on one wire to help identify polarity.

None of this has anything to do with the "microphonics" you're hearing. On interconnect cables there are very small signals and high impedances. On speaker wire there are very large signals and very low impedances, taken together this makes it unlikely you are hearing microphonics. I suggest you inspect your solder joints as well as the contact surfaces of any speaker cable connectors you might be using.

If not, then I've learned something new.
 
#44
These are all low level signals. All the wiring I refered to was inside the dac. The different insulation on each wire is due to using two different spools when wiring it so I wouldn't get confused as to what goes where.

I am inclined to belive that it is the soldering that is suspect. Like I said, it's my first project. I'm just glad it didn't smoke when I turned it on. 😀 The fact that it make really good music most of the time is a most excellent bonus.
 
#45
My apologies for mis-understanding your post. For low signal level wire the post by SY could well be meaningful.

I used Cardas ultra pure silver and Teflon sleeving when I built my own passive pre-amp (Vishay resistors and Shallco Switch, Cardas RCA jacks). To the best of my knowledge I do not have those issues. This doesn't mean you don't or that SY is wrong.

Silver and Teflon is a popular interconnect cable construction made by many manufacturers. As an example the somewhat famous KCAG by Kimber cable. I'm still surprised by the effect you and SY have experienced. Please let all of us know if the problem gets solved, especially so if removing the suspect wire solves it.
 
#47
IMO, 16ga zip cord is the standard that all speaker cables should be measured by. There are better formulas, particularly the speakers need some resistance, but still, anytime I get a new pair of speaker cables, I A/B them with 16ga zip cord (the orange stuff from the Wal-Mart Auto dept.).

The HD orange extension cord and the "White Lightning" outdoor lighting cables are both 16ga. I know the HD orange is 2-wire +ground, and I think that the white stuff is the same. No wonder that they sound a lot like 16ga zip cord.

What you do with the ground wire is up to you, but I wouldn't double one of the signal leads.

Bob
 
#50
Cal Weldon said:


Interesting, care to elaborate? I was always told that you bought the copper so you may as well use it. Not so?
Click to expand...


I've tried all kinds of cable schemes over the years and haven't seen nor heard much difference if it's "correctly" done. On my last pair, I doubled the Positive lead and it sounds fine. However, if the cables are fairly long it "might" benefit you to actually double the ground lead at the source and cap the extra wire at the speaker. The idea being that the extra wire would act as an RF drain. If it doesn't help much, it certainly won't hurt anything. As I use tinned leads most of the time, I can always connect the other end of the drain wire to the negative lead if I want to try a doubled ground wire that will wisk away all that negative energy
😉

Best Regards,
TerryO
 
#51
Cal Weldon said:


Interesting, care to elaborate? I was always told that you bought the copper so you may as well use it. Not so?
Click to expand...

The deal is that the extension cord sounds like zip cord because that is basically what it is. There is the matter of that pesky green wire. You can:

1. Ignore it. Don't hook it up to anything.

2. Hook it to ground at the amp. Might work as an RF shield, might not.

3. Double either +ve or -ve. Intuitively, this doesn't sound like a good idea because of the poential imbalance of parameters, but hey! Try all of the combinations and permutations and report back.

Bob
 
#52
Somewhere on this computer is the info regards the web page I mentioned. Looked and can't find it. Anyhow, they had used all 3 wires, had a reason and I can't remember just what it was. Bob's statement makes sense. Like all else- experiment, beats big buck wire for a try. I think the white and blue versions of that stuff look cool. Some think a clean car runs better, does cool lookin speaker wire sound better?

Bluto
 
#53
There is a wire from the amp to the speaker, there's the speaker and then there's a second wire back from the speaker to the amp. These three components form a series circuit (wire->speaker->wire). We call one ground and one signal as a matter of convenience, in fact both wires are carrying an identical signal current. It matters not at all which of the two is doubled up.

Most generic copper wires contian steel alloys to reduce streching, steel is magnetic so IMHO this kind of wire is a poor choice for speaker cable.

They make 4 conductor heavy gauge cords for 230V. If you want to use this kind of wire why not get the 4 conductor and double up both wires in the loop?
 
#54
hermanv said:

Most generic copper wires contian steel alloys to reduce streching, steel is magnetic so IMHO this kind of wire is a poor choice for speaker cable.
Click to expand...

In WW-II the wire used by U.S. ground troops was generally steel or (I think) copper-clad -- the beauty of this was that pairs could be twisted together quickly if a field telephone line was breached. There were no fancy connectors.

Anything with a dipole moment is magnetic.
 
#60
Noise explained and lessons learned

Way back in post #42 I described some trouble I was having with some low level wiring in my Monica dac. Because of this thread I thought that one culprits could have been the dreaded silver in teflon wire that I used.

Well such was not the case. After a whole lot of wire yanking and bug hunting. I had managed to lift most of the pads on the output of my board in an effort to remove the supposed offending wire. While in the middle of the tear down, I wanted some tunes to help soothe my flaring temper. So, back in goes my Bithead and I am greeted with the same distortion. Black clouds of explitives gather over my head as I yank out the interconects that I used for both dacs. It turns out that a wire from the sheild had worked loose and was rubbing on the signal wire. 😡

Well that's a long way to go just to say that the silver in teflon wire was not to blame. It's back in the system and performing beautifully.
 
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