My "good reason" is to see what happens. Some people are willing to throw a little cash at something they are curious about, and others are satisfied to read reviews on the internet and leave it at that. I'm one of the former.
I am going to state, right from the start, that I'm too old and have been in this hobby as both an amateur and as someone earning a living from audio in one way or another to engage in argument, debates, or defence of one thing or another. What you see is what you get. Take it or leave it; I do not care whether you agree or disagree, and although I most certainly welcome your alternate take, I'm not interested in challenging anyone or defending what I believe.
I do what I do because I want to do it, nothing more and nothing less, and if I feel like it, I report my conclusions, my still unanswered questions, and where I think it should go from there. This particular site is far from the ideal forum for the curious, because it's populated by a faction of people who *know everything* and waste no time in challenging anyone who dares think differently from the foregone conclusion.
Also I want to make it clear that when I said earlier that I would not sell a speaker cable constructed like the one I've been using for about 8 years or so "for much less", I am not implying that I'm in the business of selling cables.
I have not sold anyone a loudspeaker cable like the one I use at home, and have no intention of offering cable for sale. Occasionally someone hires me to perform some audio-related task, and in that regard I could end up building a cable assembly for one application or another. Hasn't happened yet, but you never know; if it came up I would do it.
I am not going to belabour this, since the topic is a review, underway, of a commercial loudspeaker cable. I have no idea how it has morphed into some kind of inquisition into the DIY cable it's replacing for the review period, but I am not going to spend much effort continuing this thread along that line.
The Hippocratic Oath says (to Medical Doctors) " ... first, do no harm. ..."
So, as a fundamental goal, when you build an interconnection cable, whatever you do, it should not detract from what would be possible with *no interconnect*.
Looking at a loudspeaker cable as an entity to itself is, in my opinion, a mistake. Power Amplifiers vary more than virtually any audio component in design and construction, and the cable between amp and crossover is part of a system. Resistance is not a huge issue in most home system speaker length applications, but capacitance and inductance can and do affect amplifier performance and, in more instances than many realize, power amplifier stability.
There is the old "Julian Hirsch" doctrine that "all amplifiers sound the same" (with a few caveats, such as reasonable design and construction, etc). It's clear to me that they don't all sound the same ... right there we have a few people dropping out of the set of those who would consider me a reasonable man.
For those of you that are left, it's my belief that amplifiers most obviously reveal their sonic signature when asked to operate near the edge of their performance envelope. As an example, amplifiers have distinct sonic attributes when operating at the onset of clipping, and if you drive your speakers at high levels, you are going to hear the differences between two amplifiers of different topology.
So, at a minimum, we must establish that those values (capacitance, inductance, resistance) form part of the attributes of our ideal loudspeaker cable. Because there is so much variation in power amp topology, we can't simply assume that if our loudspeaker cable works in one, or some, applications, that our work is done.
I have concluded that with loudspeaker interfaces between amplifier output and loudspeaker crossover input, the most important criteria is low, ideally zero (not possible, but a goal none the less), inductance. Capacitance is less important, therefore you would compromise (and there is always compromise) somewhat higher capacitance for low inductance.
You want minimal inductance because inductance most definitely has an effect on power amplifier performance, to the point where in some cases it results in amplifier instability. Inductance is affected by two factors ... the inherent properties of the cable itself, and the geometry of the cable construction.
Silver-coated copper is used for the exact same reasons it carries a Military Specification for Aircraft and Aerospace applications (and many other military or medical applications) ... it protects against copper corrosion, which with copper oxides significantly affects it's electrical performance. Combined with the skin effect, well, it's better if you don't have to deal with corrosion. So I choose not to deal with it by specifying silver-coated copper wire.
Silver oxides are relatively good conductors, so corrosion of the silver outer coating is not a detriment to electrical performance.
Part of the typical MilSpec for that application is PTFE dielectric (DuPont Teflon© or equivalent). PTFE is the closest to ideal dielectric (air) for solid material, we can call that "good enough". (There are higher-performing dielectrics, whereby air is incorporated to create a foamed, rather than solid, dielectric).
The typical dielectric for the least expensive loudspeaker cables, based on Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) can carry chemicals that off-gas a corrosive, so that the bare copper wire can corrode at any point along it's length, not simply at the open ends, and happens fairly predictably over time.
You might consider some speaker cable as a consumable, needing replacement over X number of years. I often find evidence of copper corrosion in some speaker cable at 10 years of age.
Buying MilSpec cable in diameters greater than 18Ga is rare and expensive, simply because there is not much call for 12Ga cabling in your average Satellite or 767 (Boeing is often the source of the surplus MilSpec cable I buy).
So we can purchase it new from the usual suppliers (expensive) or we can use multiple runs to increase the effective gauge. 4 runs of 18Ga, which is readily available at low cost, gives us aggregate 12Ga (2x = 15Ga).
The necessity of multiple runs means we must choose a geometry. Parallel, what distance the (+) and (-) runs are from each other, spiral, braided, are some of the choices available to us. Each will result in different measured capacitance and inductance, so the choices are not simply cosmetic or irrelevant, but none the less you have to choose one.
So, the above represents some of the thinking that went into the loudspeaker cable I have been using and the choices I've made to resolve some of the many questions I feel are valid for the application. Obviously not everyone agrees but that does not trouble me the least.
Some have answered the question for themselves and really don't need to re-evaluate their choices, and that's fine. As for myself, I am much more comfortable with examining the potential issues and solutions, to simply "find out for myself" if conventional wisdom is valid or not. I don't expect others to feel the same way, and don't care if anyone agrees, disagrees, or has a sudden, unusual interest in my financial health.
