Speaker Cable Experiment Opinion


I'm probably going to turn a number of you off with this experiment but, hey, not much harm in this! I have a pair of the DIY White Lightning Moonshine speaker cables made from Woods Yard Master extension cord. It got popular a number of years ago and you can read about it at 6Moons here: https://6moons.com/audioreviews/whitelightning/moonshine.html I jumped onboard with these a number of years ago and use them to this day. I love them, they did wonders for my system. Now, I plan to experiment and want to try doubling them up to see if I can hear an improvement. My question is, I have a few options on how I can wire these up and not sure which way sounds like the best course of action. You'll notice that the White Lightning Moonshine cables have three conductors - white, black and green. The recipe calls for the white and green wires to be wired together to the positive side at the amp and speaker and the black is wired as the negative at the amp and speaker. It's odd that the positive conductor is twice the AWG as the negative but, hey, it works and they sound great. See the constructed cables at the link above to help visualize this. So, I have more of this Yard Master cord and here are my wiring options if I double up the cable:

1. Keep the same wiring scheme as it is now but add in another run by connecting the white and green of the new cord to white and green of the original cord to the positive side at the speaker and amp and then the black wire of the new cord to the other black wire from the original cord at the speaker and amp. So, the positive side would have four 16 AWG conductors and the negative side would have two 16 AWG conductors.

2. Try to follow me here. Wire up the green and white wires in cord #1 to the single black wire of cord #2 to form the positive side. Then, vice versa, wire the green and white wires of cord #2 with the single black wire from cord #1. This way I end up with the same AWG for both positive and negative which would be three 16 AWG wires. Essentially each positive and negative lead will share one wire inside the opposite cord.

3. The simplest option of all and am guessing this would be the dumbest. Use one extension cord with the green, white and black wires all twisted together to form the positive side and then of course another cord with the three wires twisted up for the negative side.

With any of those scenarios I wonder about whether I should twist the double run of cord or not regardless of which option, or just run them parallel side by side, maybe even zip tie them together?

Any insight would be appreciated, thanks!


128x128figuy
Post removed 
Thanks, Elizabeth! I appreciate it. That sounds like sound advice and makes sense and a good place to start. Would you twist the shotgun run at all or at a minimum tie them together in parallel by zip ties? Or just left them be? I thought I’ve heard if they aren’t close together it can cause inductance issues. 

the only thing standing between you and finding out which path will butter your bread is you.

I’d go with what has worked for me in the past, first. listen. then maybe…

but what the hey! change it all up.

the important bit is to have a reference, a Baseline. then perhaps go mess it up, uh, rearrange things.

I had a pair of ICs reterminated from XLR to single ended RCA from Synergistic Audio. they chose to put the two conductors onto the negative which suprised me a bit. but, all in all, the tone never changed following that alteration. all else remained faithful too. usually the makers of these things know what works best in their various models.

good luck.
@figuy  
Would you twist the shotgun run
Yes you would lightly twist (say, a twirl every 2 inches or so), BUT as Elizabeth says, try the doubling & if you like it don't fix it any further!