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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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In Reply to: Cat5e speaker cable ?? about recipe posted by bebo on March 8, 2007 at 12:30:40:
The most prominent recipe that did not call for removing the jacket was published at the TNT audio site, however, in Europe, they have available a brand of CAT5 that used a polyethylene type jacket along with polyolefin insulated twisted pairs, this jacket material is not nearly as bad of a dielectric as the much more common PVC jacketed CAT5.Because neither the jacket nor the twisted pair wire insulation was a poor one, you could "get away" with not removing the jacket, and it wouldn't sound too bad. Realize that this particular brand and part number also had all the other factors correct: solid bare copper wire, no shielding, so it had no other sonic penalties to deal with either.
However, in the US, this particular brand of CAT 5 was not available, even the proper plenum grade part numbers that had FEP teflon for the twisted pair wire insulation, still had PVC jackets.
So when you do not remove the jackets from these kinds of CAT5 cables, the sound suffers because even with the wires having FEP teflon insulation, the PVC jacket is still there, and degrades the performance.Unfortunately, with insulators (dielectrics), the worst dielectric tends to dominate the sonic equation, so what you hear is mostly the PVC signature, with most of the benefit of the FEP teflon lost.
The guy from Audioholics claimed that he had a CAT5 with a teflon jacket, and there was one company that does make such a CAT5 cable, BUT, it is only availble in bulk, which means that you have to buy an entire spool of at least 1000 feet, AND you have to find a source that will sell 'only' this much (a single 1000 foot spool is considered an order too small for most manufacturer's, and even a lot of the larger distributors). No one has been able to come up with such a source for this rare cable. So really, you as an individual will be unable to dupulicate the results from the Audioholics recipe, as that cable is not readily available, unless you have inside contacts in the cable industry, or happen to know the right guy.
For the recommended Belden part numbers (see:
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/s2.htm
"speaker Cable #3" for the part numbers. Note that a lot of them are obsolete, but I keep them in there in case someone can find those part numbers at a surplus outlet, etc. Some modern CAT5 part numbers that do have the FEP teflon insulated wire pairs, also has the wire pairs bonded together, and with each other (pair to pair), this makes separating them and braiding them almost impossible, so beware any new part numbers, be sure to check them for construction details.Avoid common CAT 5 cables that have the following:
PVC insulated wire pairs (almost all common CAT5 wires have this)
tinned conductors
stranded conductors
foil or braid shield; there is no good way to incorporate this into the signal path, and otherwise, it is just a hindrance.Not to be a scare monger, but the CAT 5 braided construction has a very high capacitance, but adding a shield or using the PVC makes this even worse, and can cause the sound of a fairly clean clear (but a bit on the bright side) FEP based CAT5 to become downright harsh and nasty.
Your Bryston should be able to handle the capacitance, as long as you are not planning on an atypically long speaker cable, or bi-wiring, or both.
Jon Risch
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Follow Ups
- Re: Cat5e speaker cable ?? about recipe - Jon Risch 20:24:25 03/08/07 (1)
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