Anyone make their own HiFi interconnects?
 

Needed some more RCA cables and staggered at the price of some middle of the road ones. Cheaper ones seem to be just basic cable with fancy gold plugs to make them look nice and generally no better than the £1.99 and then it jumps to £20+ leads for some remotely decent.

Figured with the quantity I need (ten sets) and not in the mood to spend £200 on cable when the amp (80's technics) cost £80. I'm looking for some cut cable and plugs to make my own;

so anyone know any brands and suppliers for me to look at? As eBay/Amazon is riddled with Chinese junk. If so list them here :thumb:

I'm currently looking at Sommer Onyx cable and Rean (Neutrik) RCA plugs. Any others?

Alternatively I have previously used 10metre Autoleads double shielded RCA leads intended for car audio which I found to be fairly good quality and value cable (albeit with basic moulded RCA plugs) and chopped it up to make my own lengths. But wanted to see if there is any better alternative out there before popping down to Halfrauds.

Last time I made up some RCA cables i used Neutrik plugs (around a quid each from RS) and some double screened cable from maplins. Was part of a car audio build (so not the most gentle of environments) and never had a problem.

Tbh the biggest variable is how good the actual termination is, rather than the quality of components used. As long as your joints are good you'll be fine.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/profigold-...er-metre-n94ck

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/rca-connectors/4572947/

I have got to ask.What are you connecting that you need 10 sets of cables?:wonder:

Codfather would know

Cable wise most diy'ers go for canare starquad as it's cheap and sounds good, plenty good enough for most folk.

http://www.canford.co.uk/CANARE-L-4E...CROPHONE-CABLE

http://www.head-fi.org/t/676402/diy-...omments-thread

Cheers, the Rean ones I'm looking at are the same company as Neutrik, so we're on similar lines. Coincidentally I only found out the Autoleads RCA cables were ok when I too did a car install and the cable was miles too long so I cut it to size and fitted new connectors where I found the shielding/core to be pretty good (I was expecting an ultra-thin core that was impossible to solder or copper coated aluminium, which is often the current con with cheap Chinese cable).

Just FYI, I'm looking at these guys as a supplier: www.designacable.com they also have a eBay shop which a bit easier to find stuff on.

Well in truth got a few bits of kit that new needed cable and I got this out of storage and added a few more bits. Also need a wider table or cabinet and may ditch the tape deck as one huge stack is looking rather ridiculous :lol1:

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.sco...6c85f28c6.jpeg

Cat5e??

Now that's what I call a stack :lol1: takes me back to the late 80's early 90's.

I still have a Technics graphic eq, tuner and twin tape deck, stupidly lent my Hitachi mossfet bridgeable 480w class A amp to a friend many years ago, never to be seen again. :mad:

Car sound supplies in Derby (Spondon I think, if they still exist) is the place to get your cable very cheap, may even get them made up to measure to your spec, if they still do that.

Here you go; http://www.css-group.co/

If your into HiFi old or new,

Check out the facebook page

"High end audio for the Passionates"

Some seriously esoteric & downright jaw dropping HiFi on there ...

Mart :)

My preferred supplier for this kind of stuff are normally CPC
Far too many variations of connectors and cable on their site to list them all, but suffice to say the range is very wide and prices more than good enough.

Love the stuff... just can't afford it, so no point winding myself up looking at stuff I can't have :lol1: it's also why I know very little about Porsches and ferraris... although I'm not fussed about Ferraris... I would love a Porsche.

I have to make do with a Kenwood mini stacking system with a Dual turntable that a friend gave me and I mostly listen to records with that and another Technics mini stacking system in my 'Party' room... got a reasonable stereo in the car though but it's an old Alpine tape head unit because I'm old fashioned. :cool:

Cheers guys, I think I'm going order a few metres of a few different cables to try. I probably won't audibly tell the difference once assembled, but I find I can never guage the quality of something unless it's in my hands.

I remember way back when buying some super-flexible and super-shielded oscilloscope coaxial from Maplin which was used for the HT pickup clamp to sense the engine RPM on our old Gas Analyser. It was really nice stuff for the money. I can't remember the impedance but it shouldn't matter with RCA lead (IIRC from my A-levels the impedance shouldn't matter much with audio frequencies). Can't find it now as Maplin's website is crap for searching for stuff like this :(

In terms of HiFi, I think for Japanese stuff the cut off date for quality is very early 1990's. This is when it all went BPC (black plastic crap), production moved to China or Malaysia and "capacitor syndrome" became rife when manufacturers switched to cheaper caps that failed causing all sorts of havoc; Even today I had to replace failed caps on a 3yr old Wharfedale subwoofer amplifier the amp was branded by "Quad", yes, that old British name also lost to China. So modern electronics hasn't recovered fully from this dark era.

The SU-X amps I have are at the cusp of that decline; Good design with a fully electronically controlled Pre-amp and DAC, but compared to a late 80's SU-V which uses the identical power amp IC (SVI3205 for those who know), other parts have skipped on quality; smaller heatsink, so it suffers from heat-cycle issues (dry solder joints). Ribbon cable internal connections instead of heavy grade cable, SU-V had Technics branded PSU and power supply smoothing capacitors, the SU-x has unbranded PSU and smaller supply smoothing capacitors etc etc. That said its still good stuff but you can see where Technics started to cut corners to reduce costs, later stuff just got worse and worse. :(

Car Hi-Fi went the same way mid 2000. When the likes of Pioneer shifted production from Japan to China; there was a notable shift in quality and durability/longevity. That said, I love my Alpine PD-X F6, so good stuff exists, you just have to hunt harder for it.

So this is me keeping alive stuff that simply doesn't really exist in mainstream audio equipment without going into niche (re: costly) brands . That said, I am a Onkyo fan as they seem to produce good stuff for the money; but the output power levels struggle to match amps made in the late 80's. I guess these days it's socially unacceptable to crank up a true 100watt per channel amp (RMS into 8ohms at 0.01% THD; the bit that matters ;) ). :lol1:

Indeed, I have an old kenwood head unit that's over 25yrs old and still works, I'd have that in my car but the drive belt for the tape dec perished, which goes some way to telling you how old it is.

Shame to hear about Quad, the mate of mine that got me into serious hi-fi mack in the day had a Quad system running a set of Tanoy Jupiters, which back then was something to behold... something went wrong with it and he sent it back to them (cambridge way somewhere if memory serves) they fixed it and serviced it free of charge... won't get service like that these days.