Help me build speaker cables please!

@toddverrone - UPDATE...

Todd - I’ve built one of the cables with the conductors that I have identified above and I encountered some minor annoyances...

Construction...

1. - I used two layers of 1/4 inch shrink tube to protect the 16 gauge mil-spec signal wire and put some added "distance" between it and the neutral
   
2. - Being a twisted conductor, the 20ft neutral (i.e. on a 10 ft signal wire) only allowed for one wrap every inch. I guess the 1/4" shrink tube required more neutral than I had anticipated I was looking for 2 winds every inch, but I do not believe it will impact the sound.
   
3. - Once I had it tightly twisted around the dowel, I secured it at both ends and then warmed the wire with a hair dryer to make it more malleable and then rolled it with the palm of my hand on a flat surface to tighten the wrap and ensure there was minimal unrolling once the the tape securing the ends was removed - this is something you might not encounter to the same degree using two single conductors for the neutral
   
4. I then left it for a couple of hours to settle
5. I inserted the signal wire into the shrink tube, inserted that assembly into the helix coil and secured the ends of the neutral and signal with some dabs of hot glue and shrink wrap - it stops the neutral from unwrapping and sliding up and down the signal wire

Using the twisted neutral was a lot harder to coil and was much more "springy" than I had anticipated - not something I’d suggest to others - unless it provides significant benefits - but it does look quite striking with an orange and black twisted neutral wrapped around the black shrink tube

I’ll let you know how they sound once I’ve installed the bananas (still in transit) and allowed some burn-in

Chat Later

Interesting. With all the cables I've built, the most challenging and fun part is figuring out how to finish them so they look good, are sturdy, and the geometry isn't compromised.

I ordered 50' of 12awg silver plated copper in Teflon. I am going to see about still trying to biwire. I have an idea to make the connectors work. But I'm starting with a single run..

Interested to hear about what you hear.. I thought that twisted pair cable looked like it might be a bear to wrap. I bet having to go around its own radius also made that twisted pair use up is length pretty quickly. 

@toddverrone  - just finished te second cable.

Second one was easier, but I now have blisters on blisters - and that was using gloves.:-(

Will keep you posted as to the sound

Cheers

@toddverrone not being able to wait for the bananas to arrive, I crimped some bananas from an old pair of speaker cables onto the Helix.

Here are my findings...

For starters - 16 gauge appears to be perfectly adequate for bass reproduction
- the bass does change and I found I had to play several tracks to appreciate just what changes had taken place.
- the bass is now very detailed and very controlled, so on some tracks it appears the bass has diminished, but that is due to a less bloated bass
- on my bass test track - a song called Undring, by Sigmund Groven and Iver Klieve the bass on the pipe organ was actually fuller, more vibrant and very well controlled - important for pipe organ reproduction, whilst the hamonica was very detailed and stood out more than usual
- Albums by Stevie Wonder and Peter Gabriel also confirmed the bass is in fact fuller and more dynamic

Clarity is amazing.

The dynamics are exceptionally fast.

Image width did not change a great deal, but the depth and height is much improved.

I thought I had very good speaker cables - I do now :-)

This has been a total surprise - I tried this because you had decided to try the helix, which inspired me to see what helix could do for speaker cables on my system

So I thank you for that :-)

Since the conductors I selected were very good, but not what I would call exceptional, I thought I would be lucky to match the cables I was using - boy was I wrong.

Can better conductors improve things even further? I might get around to testing that one day :-)

Seems the helix design works very well for speaker cables.

The new bananas should also improve thing a little

I’m listening to some orchestral tracks while I type this and the sound is very natural sounding with improvements in the venue acoustics being very noticeable.

What I am wondering is - will the 12 gauge bring out the same level of details and expand the depth of the image as my 16 gauge has?

BTW - I normally wait for the burn-in process to complete before posting results, but these improvements were so startling I thought I’d give you a taste of what should be coming to your system.

I really hope you get to experience the same level of improvement.

FYI - all my cables are now of the Helix design.

Keep me posted and let me know what your findings are.

Cheers