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DIY cables question

Hello,

I first dipped my toe into hifi during covid and being on a budget, I slowly bought used to build up my system including a decision to DIY my own speaker cables. I bought 20ft of Mogami 3014 wire along with some gold plated banana plug connectors and while having zero soldering experience gave it a go. To date everything works fine but I’m left questioning whether my potentially "shoddy" soldering work is my weakest link and is holding back my setup. I’ve been flip flopping back and forth on just buying some used name brand speaker cables so I can stop the torment. I guess my main question is, when wires work, is it black or white, meaning they either connect or they dont, or can bad soldering limit the max performance of the cables or furthermore my entire setup?

Aside from my DIY speakers cables everything else is name brand, I use AudioQuest Earth RCAs (TT to Pre) and AQ McKenzie XLRs (Pre to Hegel H360), and a Curious USB cable ( Stream Box S2 Ultra to Denafrips Pontus II)

Thanks in advance.



sc0rpi043

Showing 1 response by andy2

andy2
1,526 posts
 
Making a good proper pair of cables for audio are not easy.  You can make some cheap DIY cables and they can sound decent.  I've done that before using Cat5/or Goertz foils.  But they won't be as good as good as a well engineered pair of cables. 

It also depends on the overall level of your system.  If you have some budget system, DIY cables are probably alright.  But if you have some high-end system, then DIY probably are not good enough.

The audio cable industry is filled with imitators so you have to be careful with that too.  I would stick with some well known brands.  There are too many bad actors that give the industry a bad name.



  
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