rkrk - if you like, send me a message with your address and I’ll send you a 6.5’ set of speaker cables made from braided cat 5 cable. I have two pairs, one with a larger conductor going to the mids/highs, which I’m going to keep as back up. (I just made some new speaker cables in consultation with @williewonka , but I’ll keep one set of braided cat 5 cables, just to have). The other set is just taking up space and I’d rather someone used them.
The specs: I made these from 7 lengths of cat 5 plenum cable (has Teflon insulation instead of PVC) per side. At the amp end they are separated into a positive and negative groups with silver plated BFA banana plugs. At the speaker end, they are set up to biwire. For each group of wires (+ & -) there is a HF and a LF subgroup. The speaker end is also terminated in silver plated BFAs.
Each of the 7 cat 5 cables has 4 pairs of 24 awg wires. Half go to the positive, half to the negative. So that means, at the amp end, each group (+ / -) has 28 wires which equates to a combined gauge of 10awg. At the speaker end each subgroup for the HF has 8 wires which equates to 15awg. Each LF subgroup has 20 wires, which equates to 11awg.
The second gen cat 5 speaker cables that I’m keeping are made from the same materials, are also braided, but have 8 lengths of cat 5, with the extra wires all going to the HF posts at the speaker. You probably won’t need the extra gauge that I did. I have big, power hungry speakers and amps that are 500w/channel. I decided that my mids/tweeters needed more ’space’ than the 15 awg my first set of cables provided.
Anyway, I hope that made sense. You can see pics of the cat 5 cables I’ll be keeping in my system page, but the set I’m willing to give you look almost identical, minus one run of cat 5.
The specs: I made these from 7 lengths of cat 5 plenum cable (has Teflon insulation instead of PVC) per side. At the amp end they are separated into a positive and negative groups with silver plated BFA banana plugs. At the speaker end, they are set up to biwire. For each group of wires (+ & -) there is a HF and a LF subgroup. The speaker end is also terminated in silver plated BFAs.
Each of the 7 cat 5 cables has 4 pairs of 24 awg wires. Half go to the positive, half to the negative. So that means, at the amp end, each group (+ / -) has 28 wires which equates to a combined gauge of 10awg. At the speaker end each subgroup for the HF has 8 wires which equates to 15awg. Each LF subgroup has 20 wires, which equates to 11awg.
The second gen cat 5 speaker cables that I’m keeping are made from the same materials, are also braided, but have 8 lengths of cat 5, with the extra wires all going to the HF posts at the speaker. You probably won’t need the extra gauge that I did. I have big, power hungry speakers and amps that are 500w/channel. I decided that my mids/tweeters needed more ’space’ than the 15 awg my first set of cables provided.
Anyway, I hope that made sense. You can see pics of the cat 5 cables I’ll be keeping in my system page, but the set I’m willing to give you look almost identical, minus one run of cat 5.