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Could you give me some more information about your Cat 5 cable please?
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This is info that I have gathered from various sites around (I'll put some links at the end) and is by no means my own idea - just not that creative I'm afraid
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There are lots of ways of making speaker cable out of cat5 network cable. The original idea seems to be tnt audio's FFRC (full frequency range cable). This Italian site shows a way of using inexpensive network cable to make speaker cable which is better than commercial stuff costing 10 times the price.
The way I made mine is as follows:
Ingredients
20m Low Smoke Zero Halogen Cat5 cable from Maplin (order code
VB20W ) £8.92
2x 5m lengths black Nylon braided cable sleeving from cpc (order code
CB0097366) £7.42 +VAT and delivery
5m F 130 Heatshrink Sleeving from Maplin (order code
PB27E) Not sure on price ***EDITED I put the wrong product code on before
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12 banana plugs (ones from existing cable)
Method
The idea for this cable is to braid three lengths of the cat5 cable together, secure this braid at both ends then bare the individual wires it contains and combine these to form the connectors for your speakers.
Part 1 - Braiding
Cut the length of cable into 6 equal parts (to make a stereo, biwire pair). This amount (20m) gave me two approx. 3m runs. The cables are fairly rigid but will braid together quite easily, simply plait them like girls do with hair. Secure the three ends together first and work along the length of the cables from there. There may be an easier way of doing this but the method I used was to coil each 3.5m length into a loose bundle, I then used some doubled-over insulating tape to hold this in place but allow the cable to move through the tape. What this does is it stops you getting the three runs of cable tangled all the time (something which becomes very annoying when dealing with 10ft of the stuff!) - the loose coil can give you more cable to work with by pulling some through the insulating tape ring which is holding it in place. Simply pass the coils of cable over and under each other to plait the three together - not too tight that the cable gets kinks in it but not too loose that it comes undone, it's fairly obvious when its right.
Simply work your way along the length until the whole thing is braided, this will take about 10-15 mins for this sort of length. When you're done secure the end with some more insulating tape to make sure your good work doesn't come undone (it holds fairly well, though).
Part 2 - Making it usable
Now that you have braided the cable you'll have three ends of cat5 at each end of your new speaker wire. There are different ways of terminating this but the way I chose is to use one cat5 lead for the treble and two cat5s joined together for the bass.
Use a stanley knife to carefully bare about 40mm of the cat5, cut through the purple outer jacket but be careful not to go into the individual insulators inside.
When the purple plastic is gone you'll see that the actual cable is made up of 4 pairs of wires, each pair is comprised of a solid coloured conductor and a white+colour conductor. These pairs are twisted around each other for the whole length of the cable.
Again there are different ways to do this but I used all the solid-coloured conductors for positive (red) and all the white+colour conductors for negative (black). This makes it easier to see what's going on.
Split the twisted pairs apart and group the solid coloured ones together and the white+colour ones together. Carefully use a wires strippers to bare about 2-3cm of copper from each of the conductors. They stripped very cleanly with the 0.5mm diameter hole on my wire strippers. Be careful not to be too aggressive and cut through the copper and don't catch any of the other conductors in the strippers - I did both of these things and it's incredibly annoying, you have to start again, baring more of the cable and cutting away lots of hard work
When you've bared all the conductors in the first cable gently twist the four solid coloured ones together, then the four white+colour ones. This will be the end which goes into the high frequency inputs of your speakers.
Now repeat this with the other two cat5 ends you have at this end of the speaker cable, but this time twist all 8 solid colour ones and all 8 white+colour ones together. This will be the positive and negative conductors to the bass inputs on your speakers
Move upto the other end of the speaker cable now, this time you're going to connect all three cables together, all the solid coloured conductors together and all the white+colour conductors. This will be the end which plugs into your amp.
You could stop here and just plug these into you equipment, and that's not a bad idea. If you want to finish them off completely then follow these last steps:
Part 3 - Finishing
To hide the hideous purple colour and make the cables more professional-looking use the braided sleeve to cover them, this goes on more easily than I expected, the stretchy nature allows it to slip quite easily over the braid of cat5. when the cable is covered and the braided sleeve is pulled tight to make it hug the cat5 trim the ends so that about 4-5cm of cat5 is showing.
Tape around the loose end of the nylon sleeving (it tends to fray very easily when it's been cut so do this as soon as yo can). Then slide about 5cm of the heatshrink over the whole lot. Use a hairdrier or heatgun to shrink this down and get a good grip.
You can now terminate the ends with banana plugs or spades.
There you go, two 3m stereo pairs of biwire for less than £25, very professional looking but, more importantly, the equal of many other more expensive cables. The cost would be proportionatly less for longer runs too, each extra metre would only add about £1.20, less if you bought a larger quantity of cat5 - it goes down to 30p/m if you buy a job lot (i.e. 90p for a metre run of three, braided).
Links
TNT Audio
Venhaus - a LOT more work than the method I used
CJRoss' excellent diagram showing how to wire these up
Hope thats some use!
Owain
for the advice and comments.
Linear Mode
