Up until recently I used standard speaker wire or "Zip chord" as some call it thinking that the bigger the better and
that by spending more money on the wire I obviously would get better sound.
Enter the Internet...
After finding several sites dealing with speakers, I found a couple dedicated to nothing but cabling.
Hmmmmm....why in the hell would anyone make their own cables when you can buy good speaker wire at the store?
Surely (I thought) they cannot sound that much better. After all, copper is a great conductor and the more of it you use,
the more sound you send to the speakers. Right?
WRONG!
As I started reading (and thinking back on physics classes), I learned that each material has it's own sonic properties including resonating frequencies.
So, I put this newly found (and remembered) knowledge to work and started testing everything from copper and aluminum foil (don't laugh it worked pretty good for tweeters)
to standard house wire.
What I found was that pretty much everything I used sounded quite a bit different than the others:
The foil sounded, well, thin. It had a definite sonic signature and carried very little bass and midbass.
The house wire, while working great for bass and treble when used in 16 ga. solid,
was unruly to manage and suffered from some coloration I cannot describe accurately.
It was not overwhelming, but it was there enough to bother me.
I tried magnet wire and teflon coated silver wire: fantastic for low wattage, but way too delicate and sucked for bass if I used more than 10 watts.
(Truth be known, this sounded better than any other wire I used, but was not practical for me.)
Then one day out of desperation (Actually, laziness) I just stripped the ends of all the conductors in some CAT 3 I had laying around and stuck in between my hawaii's and my Onkyo amp.
EUREKA! Could it really be this simple?! YES, It was.
Beautifully detailed treble, unbelievably smooth mids and quick, taught bass.
I then tried CAT 5 and got a little more improvement still yet.
(I now know that the CAT 5 that I had laying around was just a better quality wire then the CAT 3)
Through even more experimentation. (Geez! Does this ever end?!) :) I have started using braided CAT5 again. This time, I started using
PLENUM GRADE. It is teflon jacketed and far superior to standard CAT5.
I had stated previously that it was not worth the effort to braid wire. I was wrong. The more I listed to the new wires the more I realize that
braiding CAT5 helps them to "dissapear" in the audio chain. Give them a listen and you will understand what I mean
Silver and Silver-clad copper make the best conductors for audio that I have used.
Copper is second and only marginally less desirable than silver.
Aluminum sucks in most cases. (See comment about tweeters)
Never ever use a stranded wire of any type anywhere in your audio path.
Definitely use different gauges of wires for fullrange, woofers, mids and tweeters.
(More on this below)
What I am using now
Currently, I am using braided Cat 5 in most of my projects, including internal wiring.
I have been running a braid of 3 pairs to each speaker.
(Through even more listening tests, I now only use a double braid of 9 pairs over about 25 watts.)
Now, when I listen to the same speaker with zip chord it sounds like a pillow is over my ears.
(Drastic comparison, but you get the picture)
I must confess that I still use zip on subs in the car and the house and
that I only use Cat 5 pairs for the tweeters in the car.
