Cable Building

how do you home cryo treat stuff??? You should do a power cable tour, serious

 

I send the my cables out to be cryo treated.
It takes a weekend to go thru the whole process, which is automated and run by those with experience with the process.
It's fairly inexpensive ≈ $10-20/cable when 5 or more cables are done at the same time.

But of even greater sonic impact is the cable cooking.
And while I have not used the CD based cable conditioner approach, the industrial strength specialized circuit does a marvelous job.

As for a power cable tour, I'm not sure what that is nor what would it entail.

JJ

 

Well despite all the inspiration from you fine folks, I just don't have the time right now.

I'm planning to order from this fine gentleman: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ImpactAudioCables

Hopefully the cables are as well done as they look...

 

Do not waste your money on the wire, some of the first wire I used was harmonic tech similar to neotech and I was not impressed. My experiments with power cords led me to a path that works for me. It is not so much about the wire as much as it is about the connectors. I tried all flavors of Sonar, Marinco, and Wattgate. In the end, the Furutech sound much better to me.

I cannot believe some of these companies put a fancy sheath on some Carol cable add some marincos and charge $300-$500 for them. $70 in ends and $8 for wire is all you need to beat most $400 cables I have heard.

Some pics of my ghetto creations after the Broncos win!

 

Why not speakon? The footprint isn't much larger, and it's a much more solid connection.

 

Basically, because I'm familiar with XLRs and had both pieces on hand already from other projects. Will definitely consider the Speakon when I recase.

 

Now that the Broncos have won, I owe you some pics of my diy power cables.

first is the Supra doing Plasma duty on the Samsung and yes the ferrite is supplied by Samsung but did not hold in place without a twist tie.


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Furutech ended cables, several configurations, plugged into power conditioner.


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Furutech on simple Southwire or Carol 10 gauge 3 conductor cable. Clean, simple and sounds great!



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I made one from southwire from home depot and I couldn't get over the paper filler between the conductors, it was just too.. yucky and flimsy. the supra lorad stuff seems much more quality. But the tinning of the conductors in the lorad seems weird to me since that should lower conductivity.. might be a good dac power cord but not a good speaker amp power cord. I have a belden 12 awg I prefer for my speaker amp. I mean.. I doubt I can tell the difference in a double blind test but mentally it makes me more comfortable

 

Those power cables/connectors look nice. Just wondering if anyone has tried rewiring the NMD90 (or perhaps AC90) in their walls? I mean that wiring is normally 14/2 or 14/3... if replacing the last 5' or so makes a difference, maybe running a dedicated 10/2 circuit would make an even bigger difference...

If/when I buy a house, I wouldn't mind trying to pull a separate, dedicated homerun to power my audio gear, just to see if it makes a difference. I found bi-wiring my speakers to make an audible difference, still not entirely sure about power cables. If you knew the kind of splices electricians do inside of the electrical boxes, you may want to just open up any/all junction boxes and check the Marette connections yourself.

Also, has anyone considered just hard wiring their power cables instead of having a bunch of cord connections? I imagine the wiring feeding onto the receptacle, and the actual receptacle itself to have the most resistance in the power circuit. If our goal is to reduce the overall circuit resistance, that would help.

 

The cables are frankenlike (not going for looks, obviously) as I have utilized a number of experimental previous wires on the new connectors. As for the romex in the walls, from all I have read, it can make a difference to go upscale. A few guys I know with open basements and newer houses have done just that and put in dedicated circuits with better wire. While they say it makes a diff, I am not really sure if either of them listened before and after. But these guys have cash, good ears and hear lots of stuff. They do smack down the losers, even if they spent the cash on it, so I take it with a grain of salt.

I am sure hard-wiring would be great, especially at the component end, but not sure if I could manage the muster to do it at the ac outlet end. I will say outlet replacement from a $1.99 one to a value oriented audiophile one that was $13 was a nice increase.

 

I can state, based upon my own experience, that a dedicated run from the panel just for the audio system Will help.

I am running my system (all of 125watts total) on 12AWG romex and it made a huge difference.
Of course there are additional tweaks which all contribute as well.
But my investigations tell me a dedicated run is enormously beneficial.

JJ

 

Hi folks, how to diy this cable? http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000068OEP

 

Ummmm... I wouldn't? Not until you make sure you won't cause a fault shut-down on the fancier gear. That cable takes a L+/R+/common ground from a trs and does the following:
L+ > L+
R+ > R+
Common Ground > L Ground, R Ground, L-, R-

As you can see there are lots of ways to go wrong, it either combines the L- and R- into the common ground, and ties off the L and R Grounds into thin air, or combines all of them, which is no bueno for most dedicated balanced gear. You have to know what signals the receiving component MUST see in order to function so you can figure out which signals to fudge out, even then you are losing all of the benefits of the higher end gear.

 

@aufmerksam Thanks buddy, my firend wanna diy this but I have no idea yet. Spinning head. Found another method on the net (I don't know the meaning of "red" and "low"):

solder the grounds to the grounds on each connector, then on the 1/8th inch connector I'd hook up red to the hot pin, tip, and then low to the middle pin. Then on the XLR connectors I'd tie low and ground together, and then I'd hook up red to pin 2 (hot) on one XLR connector, and then I'd take low (colors varies, it's not the raw cable (that's ground) and it's not the red cable) and hook that up to pin 2 on the other connector.

 

I can follow some of that, but it kind of becomes gibberish. I think they are meaning "red" to be "R+" and "low" to be "L+". I still strongly recommend AGAINST creating such a cable. The only consistent signal lines are R+ to the hot pin on one of the XLR jacks, and L+ to the hot pin on the other XLR jack. There are 2 other pins per XLR that they are suggesting you join to each other, and then join again to all be together on the single ground connection on the trs jack. There is a small chance that it actually works, a better chance that it creates a ground fault and shuts down the receiving equipment, and too great a chance that it creates a ground fault and blows something up.

 

Yap, this may ruin the gear (maybe plural), lol.

 

A lot of pro audio gear should be robust enough to handle that adapter cable... assuming that the ground at the 1/8" end is serving as both L-/R- and shield for the two XLR male ends. You're not going to get any benefit of the balanced input (and might have noise issues in fact), but if you don't have single ended inputs then you make do with what you've got.

For a bit of extra security, you can always insert a DI (or ground loop isolator). Something like this: http://www.amazon.com/PYLE-PRO-PHE4...7710&sr=8-3&keywords=ground+loop+isolator+xlr

I suppose if you wanted to go as cheap as possible you could hack an adapter from this: http://www.amazon.com/Raptor-GL15-G...56047789&sr=8-6&keywords=ground+loop+isolator

 

I have a another question, there's one of the most common cables, TRS - 2x RCA, since it's so common, does this mean that this trs-rca cable has, zero risk?

 

TRS to 2*RCA is fine since everything is single ended.