DIY cat 5 cable concerns

[nightflier]

I wanted to build another cat5 speaker cable. I did this before but after all the twisting they turned out to be way too short, so I gave them away. Anyhow, I now have a 100' spool that I got for free and have some time to do this. My question is about capacitance. I've read that this cable can be a bear on some amps. Can someone explain this in laymen's terms? Any danger to my amps (I have several I can work with)? Will it be audible, and if so, what am I listening for? Thanks.

[N. Abstentia]

You're trying to use CAT5 cable for speaker cable? Like 24 gauge CAT5 cable? Please no.

[daviethek]

I think the recipe calls for combining stripped multiple fine gauge cat 5 wires. I tried this a while back with dissapointing results.

[GTF]

N. Abstentia what's wrong with a single strand of CAT5?
I had a pair of transmission line subs using 10" peerless drivers that could
play 10hz at 85 db's.
With my BassZone test cd those subs made so many objects vibrate, resonate,
fall off walls, shake rattle and roll.
I use a Carver LightStar 2.0 which outputs up to 300 watts per channel.
I used very heavy gage copper wire until one day when someone suggested I replaced
that thick heavy wire with a single strand of CAT5.
Do you know what happened? That' s right, nothing.
No fires, no heated wires, absolutely no lose of bass either in volume or frequency.
As tested with the BassZone cd, ratshack meter, graph paper, and listening.
Try it. You might be surprised.

GTF

[nightflier]

Davie,

What didn't you like about the results? I'm sort of strapped for cash right now, and so with the free cat5 cable, this was going to be the easiest solution. What kind of equipment did you use the cables with?

[E-Stat]

My question is about capacitance. I've read that this cable can be a bear on some amps. Can someone explain this in laymen's terms? Any danger to my amps (I have several I can work with)?
High capacitance can cause some amps to oscillate at high frequencies and overheat. The original Mogami and Polk cables gave early Threhold amps trouble.

rw

[N. Abstentia]

N. Abstentia what's wrong with a single strand of CAT5?
Try it. You might be surprised.

GTF

The only question I can think of is...WHY????

Shouldn't common sense prevail here?

But on an unrelated note, I use guitar strings for the wiring in my house. Yeah they're tiny, but they're free. No fires yet, so I guess it's just as good as 12/2!

[GTF]

Why not?

Have you tried it?

I've had Fulton Gold, that cable makes car battery jumper cable look thin,
Fulton Brown, and OCOS and a few others.
A single strand of CAT5 works as well as any of them.

GTF

[GTF]

One more thing.

Don't equate household wiring with speaker wire.
That's a pathic joke.
Amplifiers don't power refrigerator's, air conditioners, etc.

GTF

[nightflier]

N.Abs,

Check out these sites about the DIY Cat5 cables:

http://www.venhaus1.com/diycatfivecables.html
http://www.tnt-audio.com/clinica/cat5questions_e.html
http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/cables/messages/18324.html

And there are many others.

The only pain in the you-know-what is that it takes forever to do the braiding, and this also reduces the length you start with. The first time I did it, I ended up with 4 1/2 foot cables (I also screwed up a few times with the ends so that cost me some length too). But now that I have a large spool of Cat5 cabling, I was going to try it again and I was wondering what others who had used them had found about the reliability and the sound quality.