The evolution continues...
This is my follow up post and I have made some changes to my previous setup which was 1 CAT 5 cable per polairty per speaker using Radio Shack Banana Plugs.

Taking from a previous post I used the 3 cables braided tightly to make one.
I started with 10 ft per and when completed the actual length is about 9 feet, I did this for each polarity, tighly twisting the copper pairs together at the end and trimming the excess for 24 copper wires per polarity, I zip tied the ends and used self sticking silcone tape.
With 48 24AWG twisted copper wires the sound is quite good, and was well worth the 2 1/2 hours to make, I am very happy with the sound and its a big improvement over the previous design plus its simple no breaking out pairs and twisting this with that its everything together.

RCA 31" Home Theater
Yamaha RV1105
Yamaha K903
Sony CDPCX300
Infinity Overature 3's
Pinnacle Wide Screen Center
Advent 550S 15" Sub
Acoustic Research Toslink to CD
Acoustic Research Subwoofer Interconnect
CAT 5X6 per speaker

Value 5
Time 2 1/2 hours
Cost $12 for the interconnects, wire free

My coworker wired up my setup (Yamaha DSP-A1, and ML speakers) using Cat5 braided cable...WOW! Clean highs, deep lows. I must say I am surprised to admit it DOES sound better than some of the other cables I have tried.

How often do you get a big something for next to nothing in the nefarious world of hi-fi? Almost never.
I was hugely skeptical that the ubiquitous blue sheathed CAT 5 cable that litters every office building from Phoenix, Arizona all the way to Tacoma could do anything but leave me shaking my head in disbelief that there are so many gullible punters out there; enough to give this stuff a five star rating across the board.

Of course our friendly network crew left yards of this wire when they installed our network. I swiftly purloined two 16' lengths and went to work. As mentioned above in other reviews there are eight individual wires - four striped and four solid. I combined the solid colors: green, brown, a weird shade of orange and blue and stripped all four wires at once with a utility knife. The sheathing comes off very easily revealing a single strand of copper wire. Taking a pair of needle-nose pliers, twist all four strands together. Repeat the procedure with the striped wires.

Recently I switched from heavy duty 16 guage copper cable to Tara Labs' Prism Omni Cable. This stuff was twice as thick as my previous cable, so it had to be better, right? I'm one who believed that the thicker and heavier a speaker cable is the more sonically rewarding it's going to be. Few people, no matter how much faith they have are going to shell out $450 for a speaker cable that's no wider than a hand-rolled prison cigarette. In the wonderful world of hi-fi more often than not size matters.

I hooked these sad looking mishapen links between my AS-Labs tube power amp and my mediocre Acoustic-Audio H-CD12 monitors.(They're exiting stage left when I find a reasonably priced pair of Apogee Duetta Signatures in the neighborhood).

The first track on KD Lang's 1995 CD All You Can Eat is titled "If I Were You". You may have heard at Costcos and Price Clubs throughout the land. It is propelled at a pleasant pace by a lean and taut bass guitar which on my system always sounded a little flabby with just a tad too much overhang. Not any more. My cheap thrill cable slimmed it, trimmed it and stopped it dead just as the note was played. A very noticeable improvement was also seen and heard in separation of instruments.

Walk on to "Walk On The Wild Side" from Lou Reed's Transformer and there's more proof. The bass guitar is an upright acoustic. That's not always obvious on every note. With the CAT 5 cable the distinctive slight rattle of the double bass is always there. Also when the saxophone comes in after the "colored girls sing doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo," it was just merely interesting with the old cable. Now it's chilling.

Switching to a pair of Celestion Ditton 100 Mini Monitors improvements were also noticed. The treble was cleaner especially on cymbals. John Martyn's "No Little Boy" CD has prodigous amounts of bass guitar and swirling strings on it. This little speaker sounded four times its real size and handled the extended bass without farting (to use a technical term). Placement of instruments was also a lot steadier.

Talking of placement, my favorite test of a system's ability to hold everything together and at the same time separate instuments and voices is "Baron Von Tollbooth and The Chrome Nun" by the post Jefferson Airplane team of Kantner, Slick and Frieberg. Few systems can make the song "Flowers Of The Night" sound completely coherent correctly paced and to be honest I wasn't completely satisfied with the rendition I heard, but I'm certain that this is the best that I'll ever get from these speakers - so roll on Apogees.

So let's sum up what we've learned today. Mark is not surprised, but shocked to learn, that a cable intended for linking computers and tranferring data can make a very noticeable difference in linking speakers to amplifiers and transfering music.

BENEFITS:

Tightens and in some cases even extends bass response.

Cleans up "tizzy" treble.

Improves imaging of instruments/singers noticeably.

Separates singers/instruments more than a standard cable.

I would suggest that listeners/viewers with really high end speakers try this cable because I suspect that the higher up the chain you go the more you will notice a difference.

DEFECITS

No one will believe me/you and they probably won't try it, so you/I will be the laughing stock of our villages until we die. Then they will discover that we were right and erect a monolith on the village green to honor us. Too late you miserable .......continued page 96



What were

in response to the previous post, i actually don't feel cat5 is bright at all, i actually feel that the sound is more detail than anything else. i also have experimented quite a bit with it, and while i don't discount his assesment, my experience has been the opposite. ples when you consider the cost, there's no way it should be valued at 2 stars... of corse that's only my opinion.my newest configuration is as follows, and i highly recommend it. be aware however, that it took me about 4 hours to make, but it was woth it.

i used 6 pieces of cat 5 teflon/plenum per speaker. i stripped the jacket of each set of wire and left each pair of wires twisted. i then tightly braided three sets of wire (12 pairs) together, giving me two fat wires. i braided those two together, then used all the white wires for neg and colored for pos in a bi-wire configuration. i repeated the process for the other speaker. the result is a wire that is close to 10ga that has very low inductance. the sound is crisp-more air on the high mids and up, less pronounced bass. midrange seems a little more forward, not exactly bright, but certainly not fautiging. by the way, i used dark blue shirk tubing with spades/bananas and the result looks very, very professional. in theory it should be equivalent to kimber 8tc, but to be honest, i've never tried it. by the way, i bought 125ft on ebay for $19.00 shipped- it's an excellent place to buy overstock cable (at work they only use pvc)- just check the model number first.
p/s i had previously posted a review based on 2 sets of cat 5 pvc, and this version certainly beats it. much better cable, and for the price, easily 5 stars.

I agree with frank. I read these reviews and figured what the heck lets try it. Cat-5 cables and Audioquest spades from the local dealer. These aren't nearlly as good as the reviews would try to make you believe. Now, I agree they may be better than monster cable. But, if that is the standard to which everyone is comparing the sound that tells me people are buying cheap monster cable or the Z series (oooooh!) from Best Buy and calling this high end. The M series stuff from monster is not even as good as a pair of Kimber 8tc. If you buy your stereo equipment at Best Buy you should post to some other review site and not muck up the research I do here for good equipment (which means you should post your equipment, so we know if you have Kenwood junk or some decent stuff).
These may be much cheaper than some 8TC, but you get what you pay for, for Cat-5 you pay for cheap wire, for Monster you pay for advetising.

Sonic Frontiers SFCD - 1
Sonic Frontiers Line - 1
Sonic Frontiers Power - 1 x 2 (horizontally bi-amped, one amp per side)
Silver Audio silver bullet balanced 6.0's
Kimber 4AG 4x3 foot cables
Joseph Audio RM25si's

I've tried using CAT-5 in various configurations, both single runs and bi-wired.The biggest problem with this wire seems to be excessive brightness, which some may hear as added detail. However, in a revealing system this stuff is hard to listen to for very long before fatigue sets in.
If you want a good DIY cable try coax, even the cheap stuff can sound very good.
RG-58, 50ohm cable in a cross conducter configuration works well and is very cheap. Belden 89259, RG-59 Teflon dialectric (about $1.25 a foot in 100 spools) works very well indeed.

Ok, After reading the reviews here (and being a CNE and MCP) I decided to try this out. Iused standard Cat 5 cable from FRY's electronics and nice Cardas GRS spades.
YUCK. The cheap DH Labs T-14 may be $100 for 8 feet, but it is worth it compared to the terible sound these made. Now, I own a Sonic Frontiers SFCD-1 and a Bryston B-60. So my gear is pretty revealing and sensitive. This stuff might be Ok for home theater with xome Onkyo, Yamaha or Sony reciever. But is not to be used for serious audio reproduction.

Having worked with CAT 5/Fiber, token ring, coax, ect, I never really considered using Data cable for Audio applications, however recent upgrades to my system with Toslink for the CD player and thousands of feet of Cat 5 laying around I decided to upgrade my interconncts for the mains which to me sounded fine on plain old 14awg flat copper, the OV3's sounded pretty good even on very cheap/baseline wire that I wanted to have a starting point for these beautiful speakers.
My application of the cable was as follows, 4 each 10ft cables, one for each polarity, keeping the pairs together as close as possible, i.e., white/blue, blue white, the white blue,white orange,white green and white brown are all considered TIPS or Positive, Color first or solid color is considered Rings or Negatives ex, blue white.
Category 5 Unshielded Twisted Pair(UTP) gets its transfer rates from the twists and maintaining these up to termination gives the best performance whether in data or voice(audio).
If possible I would use 4 seperate cables one for each pol, strip away enough to allow combining (maybe 2" or more as you can always cut excess) of all 8 copper 24awg wires together while keeping the pairs together as well, I also took the two per speaker and then wrapped them together and used zips at each end and few in between, the cable tend to conform to the other quite nicely, if you are unable to run seperate cables per polarity, do not combine the solids with the solid and stripes with the stripes your defeating the whole design of cat 5 and your breaking the pairs apart and losing the benefits of the cable design you might as well run telephone wire which is untwisted, the key is the twists and is what allows cat 5 to outperform standard voice grade cabling.

After connecting just one speaker with the CAT 5, I noticed the bass alittle warmer and drums sounded more alive and and overall sound quality was very improved, I ran these into my Yamaha R-v1105 thru cheap gold banana plugs from Radio Shack, if anything I shouldn't have to worry about and EMI problems now I'm considering wiring up the center with cat 5 as well.

I would recommend anyone on/off a budget to give these a try, I have very limited exp with higher end interconnects but it sure wouldn't hurt to compare them as cheap as cat 5 is, you probably could pick some up for nothing, contractors routinely throw away hundreds of ft of it all the time, I know I have.

So far im very happy with the improvement in tonal balance, the music seems to be more alive and I did notice a deeper bass and sharper treble from NIN to Beethoven, give them a shot.
I am also considering, making a new cable, taking another 11-12 ft of cat 5 pulling out the pairs from the jacket and retwisting the pairs for more twists per inch then putting them back in the jacket and connecting them, so far they sound good enough I probably won't bother but who knows.

Total cost under $12 for the connectors
Cable free
30 minutes labor
What a Steal

5 Stars

AMAZING!!! That's the only way I can describe the improvement in sound quality that the cat5 speaker cables made in my system. I was ready to sell my 5 year old Klipsch kg4.2's and get some new speakers before I tried this 2 days ago. I recently upgraded my receiver and cd player from 5 year old Onkyo components to Harman Kardon AVR 85 receiver and FL 8350 cd changer, but I was still not satisfied with the sound quality. Sound was still too murky in the mids and loose on the bottom end, vocals lacked definition and sounded thin compared to some of the speakers I have been auditioning lately. Well, I ran across this review site and decided to give it a try--what the heck, I figured that if it didn't make any difference, (which I fully expected it wouldn't) it was cheap. Much to my surprise, my speakers suddenly came to life after 5 long years of a near death experience. All of a sudden, vocals sounded more real and crisp, the bass drum was no longer a "thud", it was tight and well defined, as were the toms. Cymbals which I hadn't heard before on songs were there--and I could even hear the fuzz out on them. Lyle Lovett didn't sound like he was singing into a mic with a wool sock over it. All the instruments and vocals took on a much more accurate sound--I started running the sound mixer for a live band when I was 18, so I know what they're supposed to sound like. Even my wife, who certainly is not an audiophile("Honey, why do you need new speakers? These sound fine") noticed the difference, as did my kids when they watched "Mulan"("Wow, Dad, those drums sounded real!") You might get some funny reactions if you tell anybody what you're doing. The guy I got the cable from said, "Um, is there a REASON you're going to use this as speaker cable?". The guy at Radio Shack, where I got the banana plugs to terminate them, just laughed at me when I told him that I was going to try this as a replacement for my Monster Cable. Guess who's laughing now buddy! You don't have to take the word of those on this review page, just try it like I did. If you can't tell any difference, then it was a cheap lesson. It's not going to make $50 speakers sound like $500 ones, but if my experience is any indication, it will certainly help get the best sound quality from what you have--and at a ridiculously low price. BTW the speaker cable I was using before was the HEAVY gauge Monster, not the XP. I'll probably get those new speakers sometime down the road, but thanks to Rob I won't have to get new cables!!!!

I just bought all new equipment last fall and have been waiting for my bank account to recover. I've been intending to upgrade cables since I've just been using pvc zip cord (yuck) for the last few months, but haven't been willing to cough up the bucks for the boutique grade cables.
I saw the previous post about using Cat5 UTP Networking cables for audio. I'm a software guy, so I know that Cat5 will transmit square waves up through the megahertz range; it just makes sense that they'll deal with audio range frequencies with no problem.

I just installed Cat5 on my system a couple of days ago. They sound great! The Gemini's have great imaging and vocals have incredible structure. The cables opened up the sound and gave the vocals more air. I'm very impressed that such a cheap upgrade can make such a big difference.

I'm running:

Preamp: Van Alstine FetValveEC
Amp: Van Alstine FetValve 550 Hc
CD: Cambridge Audio CD6
Spkrs: Dynaudio Gemini with Philip Bamberg/BESL GDR crossover
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/1511/beslhome.htm
Sub: ACI Titan