Copper Wire Lowes Electrical for Speaker Wire?

I was at Lowes and noticed that they were selling electrical wire that looked like a solid piece of copper. It had three separate wires in it. They each had their own shroud and then the three shroud wires were covered with another covering. The wires were 10 gauge. The wire looked like something you might run for 220 volt work. I know that one of the wires was a ground.

I was thinking about making speaker wires out of this wiring. I would just put banana plugs on both ends. My concern is with the wire being one solid wire. Is one solid wire different than having multiple smaller wires? I know that most speaker wires that I've seen were multiple strands of copper intertwined.

Has anyone every made a speaker cable from this type of wire or one solid copper wire instead of multiple copper wires? I only have to go about 6 feet for each speaker.



Justin

JustinJ said:

Is one solid wire different than having multiple smaller wires?

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Some say solid sounds better, but electrically it's the same (at audio freqs).

I forsee two problems:
1. Making good connection with your banana plugs (as screws may loosen and soldering needs a lot of heat - especially as you have one side with 2 large conductors if you're using all three), and
2. Getting it to lie flat on the floor, but I have seen it done with magnet wire (although not as large as 10AWG) and taped down.

I went back today to look at the wire. It was very stiff and I think you may be right about the problems with stiffness adn hard to work with.

I found a website where they built cables out of Cat 5 cabling. It looks interesting at least to try it. The only thing is that I will not bi-wire.

ttp://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/ffrc_e.html

Someone gave me some CAT3 (same config as CAT5: 4 pairs of solid 24AWG), so I have a bundle waiting to be braided together (which I'm putting off as long as possible). But I'm just braiding together 4 runs of CAT3 without stripping it all down. This gives 12AWG cables. Look for surplus CAT3 or CAT5, as it doesn't have much demand these days.

You could also look at Lowe's for some stranded 16/4 (4 conductors of 16AWG) or 14/4 (twist the red and white together for plus and black and green together for minus).

10ga solid core is a royal pita to work with .....BUT I use it for my cable so

Tosh said:

Someone gave me some CAT3 (same config as CAT5: 4 pairs of solid 24AWG), so I have a bundle waiting to be braided together (which I'm putting off as long as possible). But I'm just braiding together 4 runs of CAT3 without stripping it all down. This gives 12AWG cables. Look for surplus CAT3 or CAT5, as it doesn't have much demand these days.

You could also look at Lowe's for some stranded 16/4 (4 conductors of 16AWG) or 14/4 (twist the red and white together for plus and black and green together for minus).

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can you explain farther what you mean? sounds interesting, and i get an unlimited supply of cat3 at work. i probably have 500' in my garage now.

are you removing the sheath and braiding the pairs?

I plan to just separate the striped and the solid color wires into plus and minus at the ends and braid 4 together (yields 12AWG cables) like in the pic. The left white CAT3 braid is braided tighter than the right (you lose only slightly under an inch for every foot of un-braided cable). There are other schemes out there, but I think mine is less work (but I'm still putting it off for later).

Low Impedence Path

Guys,
I'm new to this thread, but...
I've been an engineer for many years, and into fine audo for more years than I care to count.
My intuition tells me that you want to create the lowest impedence path between your output mains from your amp to your speaker posts on your speakers.
It is known that electrons flow on the outer surface of a conductor, so the more surface area you can provide, the lower the resistance to the electron flow you will have...Lower impedence.
I would go with as many conductors or strands as you can get.
Maybe there is something that I'm missing...Parasitic harmonics in the condutor path?
I use a high quality/ high strand count 30AWG individual strands wrapped to make at least 10AWG conductor path.
Let me know if I'm out in left field.
My system sounds great with the conductors I spelled out above.

thanks tosh, i will try this and report back my findings. all the materials needed are here in mass abundance so ill give BDMarvin's advice some thought too. thanks gentlemen.

one question, how do you figure out how many 24AWG wires equal one 10AWG?

BDMarvin said:

It is known that electrons flow on the outer surface of a conductor, so the more surface area you can provide, the lower the resistance to the electron flow you will have...Lower impedence.

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At microwave freqs (>300MHz) the skin effect comes more into play.

One of my goals in braiding together individually insulated 24AWG wires is to make a lower inductance cable than the equivalent gauge 'O-O' cross-section cable.

Jimna: Every doubling of wire cross-sectional area is 3AWG less. So a CAT5 (or CAT3) cable -- 4 pairs (two doublings) of 24AWG -- is 24-3-3= 18AWG. My 4 runs of CAT3 is 18-3-3 = 12AWG. Double this again (8 runs of CAT3) yields 9AWG.

Jimna,

I would be interested in how the speaker wires work out for you.

Marvin,

Welcome to the list and thanks for the contribution to the thread. Do you have any pictures of your cables and how they are constructed? Where do you get the wire for your cables from?

Justin

My Cables

The cables I am currently using are cut to exactly the same length.
They are simply twin-lead, 'zip-style," cords that are 10AWG, 30AWG individual strand, wrapped.
I would like to direct all of you to a well put together website that backs my observations...
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm#oxygenfree
I think that you will find this site quite interesting.
Keep an open mind when reading, but I have to agree with the author of the site.
Thanks.

Here here BDMarvin. This engineer also couldn't agree more...

I had read Roger Russell's site (http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm) some time back and although I don't have an audio engineering background, all of his arguments about cable make an awful lot of sense to the electrical/electronics part of my brain. The whole page is interesting.

I made some of the braided cat 5 cable for a fostex fullrange project I did and can't say anything about their sound, but boy do they look sexy when done. Two things that are great about cat 5 are that you can get 1000' for <$100 and you can use it for wiring your home computer network too.

Also of interest to those of you reading this site, Audioholics.com did a pretty intensive quantitative comparison of the electrical properties of about 20 (if I remember correctly) different cables. The first like this that I've seen: http://www.audioholics.com/reviews/cables/diy-speaker-cable-faceoff

Another great read.

Tosh said:

One of my goals in braiding together individually insulated 24AWG wires is to make a lower inductance cable than the equivalent gauge 'O-O' cross-section cable.

Jimna: Every doubling of wire cross-sectional area is 3AWG less. So a CAT5 (or CAT3) cable -- 4 pairs (two doublings) of 24AWG -- is 24-3-3= 18AWG. My 4 runs of CAT3 is 18-3-3 = 12AWG. Double this again (8 runs of CAT3) yields 9AWG.

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^^Is there a source that I can reference on this subject? I have just constructed my first cable using 6 runs of 10' of cat3. Ill finish the second tomorrow and solder them, and see what I have. You were right about this task sucking lemons, I would continue to put it off, Cat3 is not user friendly nor is any part of this project. I look forward it being over.

On the subject of DIY cables' measured L, C, and R, an excellent summary is the Audioholics DIY Speaker Cable Face-off in John's link above (Thanks for that by the way, John!). The CAT3 cables I intend to make would be most like the type 'CAT5-V2' except that mine will be braided tighter and will be made from CAT3 (which is the same construction as CAT5 AFAIK).

From the Wiki page on 'American wire guage': "When the cross-sectional area of a wire is doubled, the AWG will decrease by 3. (e.g. Two No. 14 AWG wires have about the same cross-sectional area as a single No. 11 AWG wire.)"

Well I started this project Saturday. I found out quickly that solid core wire isnt friendly to braiding. After trial and error (and a lot of waisted cat3) I decided it was impossible to work with 10' of 42 individual bare wires, so I left the middle 7' inside its original sheath. I need some connectors so this is as far as I have gone so far:





If the final results are good I will buy some techflex for the center sections which should look far better than they do now.

Thanks for planting the seed Tosh!

I would use all the solid color wires for one conductor and all the striped wires for the other. That way the self-induction is as low as it going to get and the wires are still in the sheath.
What did you need a reference on? Was it conductor size?

I used blue/blue white and green/green white for + and the brown/brown white + orange/orange white on the - side. any reason that is inferior to the strips and solid?

But yes I was wanting to reference the conductor size if Im using 6 equal lengths of cat3.

Jimna said:

I used blue/blue white and green/green white for + and the brown/brown white + orange/orange white on the - side. any reason that is inferior to the strips and solid?

But yes I was wanting to reference the conductor size if Im using 6 equal lengths of cat3.

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It,s not going to matter in the least for any analog audio purpose, but each solid and stripe pair has lower self-induction than other combination.

Six CAT3 24AWG cables are 48 conductors or 24 hot and 24 neutral.

2 - 24AWG = 21AWG
4 - 24AWG = 18AWG
8 - 24AWG = 15AWG
16-24AWG = 12AWG
32-24AWG = 9AWG

Or using method number two:

One 24AWG wire is 404 Circular Mils.
So 24 24AWG wires are 9696 Circular Mils.
A 11AWG wire is 8234 Circular Mils.
A 10AWG wire is 10380 Circular Mils.

So it's almost a 10AWG wire.

That was my calculation as well, but thanks for the confirmation.

One thing is for sure, these might win an award for ugliest cables eva! I have them almost finished. I am excited to try them....