Woods Yard Master Patio Cord as Speaker Wire!

[Eddie2u]

I got bored and wanted something to do so I decided to try the Walmart cord as speaker wire.

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/w...moonshine.html

I have them hooked up now and I am impressed.I am shocked that they sound good.

Warning there seems to be two types of cords in similar packaging!
I bought the wrong one by mistake.
The right one has SJTW E56365 written on the wire with Woods engraved on both male\female plugs. Brass\gold colored prongs on the male plug.
The package looks like this.



The white and Green wire are used together as ground and the Black wire is positive. I read it sounds better that way so I made mine that way.

http://www.audiocircle.com/circles/i...&topic=50161.0

[Eddie2u]

After messing with these for a while I think for 2 channel music the Wal Mart wires gave my speakers a nice musical sound. For 5.1 sound they were missing some of that in your face low end sound that my other speaker wires produced. It seems my older wires produced that for some music also. But it did not sound right with it in and had to be EQed out.

Is there is a speaker wire that does both out there? I guess I will have to keep looking, but for now I will be using the Wal Mart cables for music.

[mdabb]

Hey,

I like making some of my cables too. I kind of used this as reference and did my own thing.


L/C/R: Inductance (L in henries), Capacitance (C in farads), and Resistance (R in ohms). Resistance is a DC component, and is called resistive impedance. Inductance and capacitance are AC components, and are called reactive impedance.

Resistance is easy to wrap your hands around: The smaller the conductor, the more resistance it's going to offer. Find a really, really thin straw and a really, really fat one. Then go out and get your favorite, double thick chocolate milkshake and see which straw you want to spend a hour pulling the milkshake through. That's the intuitive part. The rest of it requires an understanding of Ohm's law (Voltage = Current X Resistance, or E=IR), and how that interacts with series and parallel circuits when those circuits are reactive, meaning that the impedance changes with frequency due to frequency dependent energy storage and counter electromotive force, commonly called back EMF.

If you're already familiar with the typical loudspeaker impedance curve and the above principles, you're already on board. If not, a quick summary will have to suffice.

The signal from a power amplifier is proportional to voltage. Even though we're delivering power, the voltage is what we want to control, hence the "voltage source" designation. If the correct voltage is applied at the loudspeaker terminals, the appropriate power (watts, which is voltage x current) will be drawn by the loudspeaker as a function of its own impedance and the applied voltage.

Cable resistance is a series component. You can think of that as "directly in the way." When the signal has to move through cable resistance, the resistance drops a portion of the voltage. Intuitively, we worry about a power loss. Unless you're running, a single pair of Cat-5 or 24 AWG wire you picked up at the thrift store, power loss is inconsequential.

What's of more concern is frequency response, and indirectly, damping and transient response. The frequency response issue arises with resistance, which in itself is not frequency dependent, but the impedance of the loudspeaker almost always is. The voltage drop caused by the resistance will be directly proportional to its share of the entire series circuit. That means, in short, wire resistance will cause less voltage drop at frequencies where the loudspeaker impedance is greatest.

For example, a loudspeaker's typical impedance peak is at the woofer's low-end resonance, often in the range of 20 ohms -30 ohms, say at 40 Hz. Say, then, for the sake of illustration, that the loudspeaker drops to 2 ohms above and below that point. It's an extreme scenario, but not impossible, particularly in the "tweak" market that considers a difficult load some kind of unsaid status.

If we insert a substantial resistive component in series with the loudspeaker, via cable or some misguided "current source" circus trick resistor, what you'll get is higher output at the impedance peak at 40 Hz, and less output above and below, making the bass sound boomy. This applies to all frequencies, but the typical impedance of most loudspeakers makes this range the most common concern.

Inductance is also a series impedance factor with cables, but the inductive portion of the impedance of a cable changes with frequency. The higher the frequency, the greater the series impedance contributed by the inductance. The same rule of series circuits applies, in that the voltage drop is in proportion it its share of the series impedance, but because its impedance rises with frequency, the inductance attenuates higher frequencies more. This is why inductors are used to keep high frequencies away from the woofer in crossover networks.

This is potentially significant with loudspeakers, especially electrostatic panels that have an impedance that drops with frequency at the highest range, because of the low impedance value of a loudspeaker make any series component of the cable more significant.

With low voltage interconnects, like audio cables between your CD player and receiver, the series resistance and inductance of a cable have very little effect, to the point of being forgettable, as the input impedances typically range from tens of thousands of ohms on up, where the effect of a few ohms in series is inconsequential. You want a very low impedance ground path for noise reasons to reduce ground loop problems, if you've got a ground at all, but that's an entirely different topic.

Capacitance is a parallel impedance factor in a cable. The impedance of a capacitor falls as frequency rises. If you took a tiny capacitor and put it in parallel with your loudspeaker terminals, it would reduce the bass. That is why they are used with tweeters in crossover networks. If it were a big enough capacitor, your amplifier would have a hissy fit, drive tons of current through it at high frequencies (as it'd look like a short), and smoke or blow a fuse. Except for long runs of exotic cables with lots of individually insulated conductors connected to inherently unstable amplifiers, there's not enough capacitance in a hundred feet of speaker cable to make any competent amplifier raise an eyebrow.

Capacitance is of interest on low voltage signal transmission between typical CD players and receivers, because of the typically high output impedance associated with such components, usually in the 1 kOhm range. If there's enough capacitance dropping the impedance of the total load that the output sees at high frequencies, the impedance of the output circuit itself will drop the voltage, causing less output at high frequencies. So, for interconnects, you want low capacitance. But with speaker cables, where the output impedance is usually lower than the contact resistance of the terminations, this issue isn’t one. For speaker cables, you want low inductance.

Addressing our speaker wires of discussion, 14 gauge cable pairs have less inductance than a 10 gauge cable pair because their cable centers are closer together due to the smaller diameter of each conductor, but we want the low resistance of the 12 gauge or 10 gauge pair. If we double up on 14 gauge wire, the impedance halves on all counts. Not only do we get the same amount of cable as an 11 gauge cross section (give or take a hair) and thus the low resistance component, but we also further halve the inductance as compared to a single run of 14 gauge wire (which already was less than a single 11 gauge run).

Those familiar with capacitors in parallel will note that the capacitance will then double, in which case we've gone from an amount that we wouldn't even remotely consider caring about, to twice that, which in our context is exactly the same.

Again then, when it comes to choosing between keeping inductance or capacitance down in speaker cables, low inductance is our priority, and low resistance is a given.

Keep in mind that the idea of doubling up on 14 gauge conductors for speakers only works when you bind two conductors together at each end. If you keep them separate on the loudspeaker side, as would be done when you bi-wire a speaker, the benefits described are forfeit, as you only have one cable in series with any given crossover section at a time! In other words, you’ve got the same resistance and inductance in series with a given driver section, but are still using twice the wire, AND have twice the capacitance of a single run.


The above info is from this article.
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volum...le-5-2003.html

I used Canare Starquad wire and Kimber Kable Post Master spade lugs. Soldered all the connections and dressed it up with Techflex and heat shrink tubing. Looks good and preforms even better.

[lutefisk69]

[QUOTE=Eddie2u;1492978]For 5.1 sound they were missing some of that in your face low end sound that my other speaker wires produced. It seems my older wires produced that for some music also. /QUOTE]

What is your other speaker wire?