Who uses home brew cables?


Seems to me these days that the easiest thing for the audio hobbyist to cobble up as a DIY project are cables! whether interconnects, speaker cables or power cables. Who's gone down that road?

I've done it- right now I have several home made ICs in my system. Cables I've used range from Klotz, DH Labs and Neotech; connectors have been either Neutrik or Vampire. These days, my choice of connector is Vampire for RCA and Neutrik for balanced. If I get adventurous I cover my creation with Techflex.

I've even made an 8 inch set of jumpers decked out in nice bananas and Techflex. The wire- Lowes stranded 8 awg. The results far surpass the stock jumper bars that came with my speakers. I doubt that whole project cost me $20!

I find the Cardas solder easy to work with. A Hakko soldering station helps too.
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Showing 1 response by raymonda

I make my own cables. I use teflon silver plated oxygen free copper in various gages depending on the application. With ic they are sheilded.....with speaker wire or hook up they are unsheilded. I have few unsheilded and they work with 2.5 volt signals but for low level signals...e.g they need to be shielded or I get emi and fm interference. I've used a variety of rca....lately I've been using rhodium plated wbt type with carbon sleeves. They sound good and look nice. The wire is all military surplus that I buy from a vendor on ebay. In my system they have sounded better than any cable I've tried from manufactures. Admittedly I don't have the cash to buy or try uber expensive cables but those that can be had for 500 or less have been bettered or equaled by what I make.

I also make my own mic cables, too. I use neutrix xlr....they are the best and are the only ones that are truly road worthy.