Decware’s latest offerings of cabling motivated me to up my cabling in the Chariot. I did some research on the different wire being offered for sale on the internet and asked Steve a few questions on suppliers and observed his woes dealing with vendors. Six months later my system has a full DIY compliment of interconnects from the DAC to speakers. I also changed some of the internal wiring to match in some of the equipment with the rest to follow sometime in the future. The result is amazing and reveals some maintenance that needs done on the equipment that is 20 years old. The 6 month journey took many turns and created frustration at times. It is however well worth the effort!
I will detail the speaker wire acquisition, construction, and connection.
Below is the wire first purchased on E-Bay. It was advertised as 8AG which is the total accumulation of the strands summed up. In this configuration it only ended up as 11 gauge using the geometry to upgrade the signal path to the speaker by lowering inductance and capacitance by keeping the plus and minus loops from being parallel. It has 7 strands of OCC silver plated wire of varying gauge encased with Teflon in each of the 16 strands that create the braid. Using two lengths of this item per speaker will give the desired 8AWG for Decware’s amps hooked to Lii Audio’s 10” Crystals. I purchased 7 meters to give the needed length of 10.6 feet in the system using one cable per speaker.
The next picture is the banana ends purchased to terminate the cable. Those are advertised as being gold plated and non metallic. Well, the bodies are non metallic but the prong was not. It readily attracted and stuck to a magnet. A USA NJ supplier sells these and the price is cheap so be aware. I used these anyway knowing full well that this cable will probably end up in the office Zkit1/Tiny Radial system. Thinking that this scheme will only create a 11 gauge wire surfaced suspicions of not really working as well as the ZSTYX clones that are 8 gauge a leg.
It took no time to assemble the cable. The results were inline with my thoughts. The bass was weak and flabby at first and the high end was edgy. This all ironed out over time and became a very good cable. The bass is sublime but weak as compared to the ZSTYX clones with the 10” Crystals in Huijgen’s folded horn cabinet.
Below is the wire ordered for the ultimate cable in my eyes for the Chariot. It advertises as 16AWG. This is misleading and resulted in some other improvements in the final hookup. The wire is actually .9144mm in diameter which translates into 19AWG! The spiral colored thread is actually another silver/copper wire that is .0762mm in diameter. Add those two together and it comes close to the 1mm advertised diameter of the wire. I questioned the vendor about this and they confirmed that it is actually 18 gauge solid core wire and plan on updating the advertisement. It is closer to the actual truth but still only 19 gauge wire with a 40AWG spiral loop.
In the description, it was also referenced that the wire is 91% the speed of light. Hmmm, why is this referenced? Maybe it is a resistance reference, or maybe a superconductor reference? I measured the inductance created by the spiral at .0685mh. A little research found that a superconductor coil shunted will cancel its own inductance. So maybe this is a hint that shunting the spiral will eliminate conductance in the cable. The only way a superconductor can approach zero resistance that a shunted coil would need to cancel inductance is it has to be in a very cold environment-like zero kelvin. I just cut this spiral wire as it exited the jacket after stripping the Teflon from the solid core wire. Also found that using a 16 wire gauge stripping tool it perfectly stripped the cable leaving the 40 gauge spiral with its own jacket intact. This worked for the red spiral cable flawlessly but the black cable did not fare as well. Interesting that the black cable is offered at a reduce cost at this time as compared to the green and red colors. Awe, the language barrier of our Chinese friends still prevails!
Purchasing 60 meters of each color of this wire would provide enough to make 16 strands 11 foot long times 2. At 18 gauge each (so I thought at purchase), the total of 8 strands per leg will create a 9 gauge cable. A bit on the light side but better than 11 gauge, plus the new cable is solid OCC. I read that stranded wire can add its own signature or fuzziness.
It is important to cut each leg at the same length. I made a jig to do just that. The back of 2 molded base boards lying around the shop were used as a guide for cutting. Using clamps, the base board ends were clamped together to the work bench making a straight track for laying the wire. A mark was made for the desired length measured from one end of the assembly. One end of the wire was spotted at the mark and clamped in place. The other end was stretched taunt and cut with a pair of side cutters at the far end of the base board. This wire is stiff with learned bends from handling. Stretching is necessary to ensure uniformity in length of the pieces.
It did not take long to get 18 pieces of each color cut using the jig and clamps. 18 pieces the same length you might ask? Carefully measuring a roll of wire before cutting there was enough left over to add the extra 4 pieces by shortening the 11’ by 2”. This sort of offset the actual 19 gauge wire that was received. Making the final product a hair under 10 gauge not 9! There will be some further moves to improve this short coming later.
Handing this wire so far gave some serious doubt on its ability to be braided. It is stiff and tangles very easily in a bunch. No very braid friendly by nature. Another jig was in order to combat this. The pic below shows how this was tackled in a very elegant way using some scrap oak with drilled holes inline. There was not much bother to make these pretty just functional.
The long oak board with holes is clamped to a stand on one end of the bench. The wires are inserted in the holes as shown and bent to hold in place. Again it is important to keep all the wires the same bent length.
The other 2 blocks of oak with holes are placed loosely at the other end of the extended workbench to fit the full length of the wires on a flat surface. This will make it easier to handle the wires for braiding keeping all in order.
This is where it became difficult for me and most of the reason it took a month to complete from receiving the wire to, at this time, 32 hours of music burn-in. An even number braid is relatively easy to complete but the repetitive steps must be exactly followed for a well defined product. This can easily be found on YouTube and I will not bother to explain the steps. The pic below shows one of the steps of braiding a round braid. Using the jig with holes one single wire weave is completed with one color then returned to the that same color side and insert on the far end of the opposing open hole of the starting hole in that color group of wires. Alternate this process between colors until there are no more inline holes available. Then the whole group of each set of wires needs reset one by one to the original starting position. Repeat. Sound simple? It is really simple but a well managed set up in this manner can lead to disaster if not strictly paying attention to all the moves. One little slip up will require undoing the braids to hopefully fix. Sometimes a total start over is needed. Yea there was a few walk away moments over a week's time!
Can you see the mishap below? This one forced me to start over.
Using a flat surface it is easy to work the stiff wires to form a nice even braid. My braided loops for the 18 wire set ended up to be a count of 81 over 10’ 10”. It is good to factor in about 7% shrinkage to the completed braid length if there is a certain finish length desired. Mine ended up about 10’ 4”. This can vary by the tightness of the braid. Also work to keep both cables with the same number of loops. Keeping tightness the same would be a good idea but mine varied. IF this was done again a ruler tacked under the entire length of the braid would help to accomplish even spaced loops.
The finish cables waiting for installation.
Remember my desired wire gauge was not obtained by miss information? This problem got me thinking of ordering more wire and making a 24 braid cable. Not really wanting to go that route and already thinking of the resistance created by inferior connectors, I decided to shorten the cable length to the driver by 29%, eliminate the cheap banana connectors, and remove one set of speaker terminals. This meant feeding a direct connection to the driver in a folded horn enclosure and replacing the speaker terminals on the amp that would not fit 10 gauge wires under the compression nut. The pic below shows how this thought was tackled with two 64 cent plumbing caps, plywood, acorn nuts, and flat plate steel.
The horn wall’s plug being installed.
Wire installed on Lii’s Crystal 10” driver. These drivers have a strong fiberglass board that mounts the compression terminals which was welcomed when the driver was removed to do the hack. I could not remember what was used. It has been almost two years since these were deployed in the Chariot.
The cable is exiting the other side of the plug.
The other end of the cable connected to a SE84 with the speaker terminals taken from the Crystals cabinet installed.
The cable as it exits the horn.
The last time listening with the new cables at 28 hours burn in, the bass is far better then the first hour. The highs are brilliant. The analytic presence has become mellow. Right from the start it was noticed that space around instruments is owned by that instrument. The instrument resonates with a deep soundstage of its own. For instance Maracas can be follow with the motion of being played while precise reproduction of the beads striking the inner shell can be heard. Congas much the same with flesh striking the head pinpointed while it blooms resonating throughout the stage.
There seems to be an issue that I was aware of being enhanced with the new wires, vocals while better has this trail of hash at times. It seems to get better as the wires burn in but it just may be time for a new DAC or recap the true and tried.
John
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Cabling Journey (Read 2341 times)
