DIY cable gallery

[luvdunhill]

[swt61]

Nice!

[luvdunhill]

Guess where that 4-pin female XLR came from It now has a 4-pin male XLR on it, and will ultimately go on the Fostex T10s.

[swt61]

Must be the K1000 speaker adapter/extension cable I gave you. Glad it found some good use after all.

[Voltron]

VERY nice!

[n_maher]

Suck it Stefan

[Pars]

Didn't know where to put this...

I bumped the set of Ultralink locking bananas I had for sale on HF (and here). I got a pm asking me if these would work for a K1000 pigtail, which I assume is a cable to connect them to speaker terminals?

As long as the binding posts accept banans, I would assume so, but thought I would ask.

[grawk]

can't imagine why they wouldn't

[n_maher]

Yup, they should work just fine with any binding post setup to accept banana plugs. Spring-clip speaker terminals need not apply though.

[Nebby]

Yea, they'll work as long as you make sure a strand or two accidentally get put into the other set I like the scotch tape.

[n_maher]

I'd be concerned if the run got really long and they were feeding power hungry speakers. Any idea what the strand diameter is?

[Nebby]

did you mean "doesn't get put into?" it's milspec scotch tape.

Indeed, that's what I meant. Not sure how I managed to type that the first time; I blame my tiredness.

[grawk]

The ethernet speaker cables I've seen in the past generally use more than 1 complete cat5 cable per phase, rather than sharing both over 1.

[Nebby]

That's a good point, I guess it would depend on the length of the run and how much power is going to be required as Nate said earlier.

[n_maher]

4x24 is roughly equivalent to 18ga so you should be ok. I was concerned it was more like 28, which would have made the bundle just a single 22awg conductor which might have been scary.

There are secondary affects to consider here that I can't help with, the cumulative capacitance and resistance presented by a multi-strand cable like that could be problematic for some amps.

[cetoole]

I would think the capacitance of the taket, especially with the transformer box, would swamp cable capacitance effects.

[CarlSeibert]

While I've never taken the effort to measure it, I doubt like all get out that one set of eight conductors by 30 feet would be a capacitance problem. Most Cat-5 speaker cables have a ton more conductors.

By the way, with some looking you can find plenum grade network cable that has Teflon dielectric, at least on the strands themselves. If you, ah, obtain a reel of such, there's all kinds of possible configurations for speaker cables.

[deepak]

it's 24 gauge solid, four wires per side. it's going to run 30 feet or so. the TakeT loaner will be arriving at my place fairly soon, and i want to get the transformer box close to my desk. it won't be running speakers. i'm not quite sure what the power requirements for that are, but i doubt it'll be all that high a draw.

The TakeT I'm sending you has 2 speaker wires, I think they're only about 4-5 feet though.

[deepak]

my desk is a bit further away than that...

Heh missed the 30 foot requirement

The headphone adds another 8-9 feet in case your ethernet speaker cables still don't reach.

[spritzer]

I had to fix my Van den Hul The First cable after an idiot managed to destroy one of the RCA's. While I was at it the only sane thing to do is make some cables while I was at it.

The First is all carbon (no metal inside) and it was an epic pain to make sure not one of the hundreds of tiny carbon threads made contact with the other tiny carbon strands. The other cables are just old Kimber 8TC speaker cables cut up and braided.

[Duggeh]

On CAT5 for speaker cable, it's very very inefficient. Presumably unless you use loads together. I had 2 lengths per channel and cutting the ends off a mains extension cable was quicker, easier and far more efficient than the CAT5.

[Nebby]

Perhaps an extra long power cable

[Duggeh]

Workforce 100 Ft. Orange 16 Gauge 3 Conductor - 277525 at The Home Depot

Cut that into quarters. 4 lengths of 25 feet. Sorted.

[cetoole]

On CAT5 for speaker cable, it's very very inefficient. Presumably unless you use loads together. I had 2 lengths per channel and cutting the ends off a mains extension cable was quicker, easier and far more efficient than the CAT5.

By inefficient, do you mean it is a lot of work to make, or actually significantly impacts the volume of the system?

[Duggeh]

It's more effort than putting a banana plug on a 3 core mains, but not much, neither is a hard job. But the difference in volume was large.

I'll dig them out of the box tomo and check if need be, but it worked out at like one quarter turn on my amplifier dial with the Soundlabs. It turns less than 360 degrees from nil to max. So it was a LOT of power lost.

I am running a small amp with very very hungry speakers so the difference might have been upped because of that. But after I spotted what was going on I was most surprised.