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
For what it's worth the twist rate that worked best for me with Duelund tinned copper in cotton oil-impregnated was every three inches.
Carry on, I think it's great to experiment... :-)
My "off the cuff" thoughts would be that your option 2 may reduce inductance and thus be a good way to go for speaker cables, and particularly for MF/HF drivers.  You would want to keep both cables in close proximity and probably twisted together would be best.

Additionally, if you bi-wire, what works best for the MF/HF drivers may not necessarily be required for the LF drivers.  In the case of LF, it may be sufficient to simply run two separate cables, connecting white, black, and green all together for each of the two polarities (i.e., pos and neg).  This would decrease the resistance to the LF drivers, which is typically a good thing.  It would also open another option that would be to connect the MF/HF drivers using your existing cables and configuration (since it seems to work for you), and then connect the LF drivers using one full (three strand) cable to each polarity.

As the others have already pointed out....experiment!
@lak Thanks! I’ll keep that in mind as I try to twist these up. It’s good to know that twisting is the way to go. Right now they are not twisted very well and imagine it is why I hear some additional high end delicacy (hesitant to say roll-ff) and some pronounced midbass and lower midrange (which I happen to kind of like) due to the increased inductance.

@mitch2 Thanks! Unfortunately I do not have biwireable speakers nor two sets of posts on my amp. I’m curious your quick suggestion to maybe try scenario #2 and would love to hear your reasoning on that because I don’t understand the electrical properties to know why it might be good. Is it simply a matter of intermingling the conductors with that one conductor from each cord sharing polarity within the other cord that helps keep the overall scheme of conductors closer together? Reducing inductance?
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It sounds like what you are doing is increasing the overall wire gauge. That could help the bass but I doubt if it helps with the upper frequencies.

ozzy