Duelund DCA 12ga Hookup Wire

@mitch2 

Did you try your build with and without Flexo or the Techflex product you referred to above? I wonder if it dulled or darkened the sound in any way? Thanks.  

That Duelund vintage style and tone wire is just wonderful. I like it better than the Duelund silver as the tone and presentation is spot on for my tastes. Just a far less fussy wire than silver. We want our systems to play all our favorite recordings well, not just the great sounding recordings and the Duelund vintage wire helps us achieve this goal.

I use the Duelund vintage style wire everywhere in my rig. The 12 gauge makes great speaker cable for sure. I assume you twisted your runs?

Well to make a proper xlr cable you use two runs for pins 2 & 3 only. You twist these two runs and place them in a nice braided copper shield. The shield is formed/twisted into a wire at both ends and connected to pin 1.

Be sure you twist the two Duelund wires right up to the point they are soldered to pins 2 and 3. Run that twist as close as possible to the solder point. Also keep the that twisted braided shield that you formed into a wire as short as possible .... just long enough to solder properly onto pin 1.

I prefer the 20 and 16 gauge for ICs and would go no smaller. I like the 16ga better, but that is a subjective thing really. You get a tad more body and weight with the 16ga. 20 gauge also sounds fantastic and should be great on the dac connection. The Duelund wire is not as thick sounding as the Western Electric mentioned above making the use of 16ga very good on the ic.

@mitch2 Build is slightly more complex and if you read on this subject some feel it adds noise and some undesirable SQ issues. Others swear by it. Goodness, like all things in this passion, opinions are in great supply. I have not compared the two builds side by side and this is the only way to know. I will do so shortly.

I would love to hear Ralph of Atmasphere  chime in.

Thanks @mitch2 .   I agree with your interest in anti vibration damping in cables.  I am solidly in the camp that no shield sounds best and even not using synthetic outer sleeving....just silk or cotton.  I have come to this conclusion by building and testing the two options and listening very carefully over and over. Shielding always seems to darken and generally mess with the natural tone. I will test the Flexo in and out of the same cable.  Interesting product.  

Yes,  twist the wires on pins 2 and 3.  Just use some nice 1/4 inch copper braid from sellers like Amazon or Parts Connextion etc....

Make sure the braid is pulled up as close as possible to your xlr plug solder connections.  

Yes I have. Most of my customers want long xlr cables and I think shielding is smart for these.

They can be built as you say with a shield which I have done. I like to use a shield on a properly constructed xlr cable.

This is a pretty good point that Paul of PS Audio made; 

“
Here's the deal. Balanced XLR type cables, when used properly, have great noise immunity (as he said). They accomplish this noise immunity through something called common mode rejection. Inside the balanced cables are two signal wires (where an RCA style has only one) and a ground. When something hits both signal wires at the same time (like noise and hum might) it can be said that this is a common signal and it will be rejected. Thus the term common mode. Make sense?

The reality is a lot less clear. The common mode rejection rate depends on the receiving and sending piece of equipment. Some products have great common mode rejection (CMR) and others have lousy common mode rejection. For example, PS Audio products have some of the best at about 80dB for our preamplifier. This is unusually high in consumer audio. Typically you might see CMR levels of 30dB, 50dB and so on.

What this means is that unless you are completely sure about the CMR effectiveness of your equipment, you're better off with a shielded version. Further, even if you have something that's as good as ours (and others) shielding the cable removes even more so that when you combine the CMR with the shielding, you get extremely quiet results.

if the cable is well designed, there won't be any negative effects to the shielding.

Hope that helps.

paul”