Rinascita
Active Member
I work at an Audio Video store. It is fairly common at my work to find random wire being thrown away. This wire is either small runs that didn’t get used at installs, or old wire pulled from jobs where we installed something new for a client. Generally, most of it is trash or too short for most applications. However, I recently saw a coworker throwing away a bunch of 12-2 wire. This made a very fun idea pop into my head. What are the best speaker cables I could construct using salvaged materials that were being thrown away? Trash can cables: Here we come!
The wire: 12-2 copper. Exact Origin unknown. I believe it came from a relatively high end home theatre our installers were working on recently. I believe this was the wire used in said theatre. I imagine it was used to wire in wall speakers.
I decided to do double 12G for each run. This gave me an effective 9 gauge equivalent cable. So I cut four runs of the trash can wire to the desired length. Then used 2 runs per channel. I had originally planned to either run bare wire, or use terminations I found around work (keeping with the free/ trash can theme). However, the wire was too large to fit any of the terminations I could find. So, I terminated the wire using some Banana plugs from Parts Express I had at home. At this point, I was having fun and decided to actually put a little effort into these. I thus took the time to twist each pair from end to end, and use some heat shrink tubing. The end result, is a fairly attractive cable.
Now how does it sound? innitial listening has been very promising (surprisingly haha). I will post updates on the sound of these over the weekend.
A very enjoyable, lighthearted, and simple project. Happy listening friends
The wire: 12-2 copper. Exact Origin unknown. I believe it came from a relatively high end home theatre our installers were working on recently. I believe this was the wire used in said theatre. I imagine it was used to wire in wall speakers.
I decided to do double 12G for each run. This gave me an effective 9 gauge equivalent cable. So I cut four runs of the trash can wire to the desired length. Then used 2 runs per channel. I had originally planned to either run bare wire, or use terminations I found around work (keeping with the free/ trash can theme). However, the wire was too large to fit any of the terminations I could find. So, I terminated the wire using some Banana plugs from Parts Express I had at home. At this point, I was having fun and decided to actually put a little effort into these. I thus took the time to twist each pair from end to end, and use some heat shrink tubing. The end result, is a fairly attractive cable.
Now how does it sound? innitial listening has been very promising (surprisingly haha). I will post updates on the sound of these over the weekend.
A very enjoyable, lighthearted, and simple project. Happy listening friends
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