Can a good pair of RCA's be made using primary wire, a drill and gold ends? Should they be insulated or shielded?

 

Yes, IMO they can. I've done on two of my cars. Check the soundddomain link in my sig and look at the Avenger and Daytonas on page 1 and 2. Shielding is pointless.

 

http://www.blazinlow.com/forum/showt...threadid=19255
I am not sure if you'll have to sign up

 

^ concur, there is a significant price gouge with speaker and custon RCA's. You can get 80% of the performance for 20% of the price. As long as you keep the wire selection simple that is, for cables under $100/meter the bulk of the cost is the RCA ends... over that price the fancy dancy insulation, silver coatings, and psudo-technology are cost drivers (it costs a lot to properly engineer a product to 'outperform' and then because of the price being high you dont sell a lot of it so the price stays high). The complex extrusions Monster Cable, MIT and Audioquest use keep tooling prices higher as well.

 

Personally, I make my own cables, I try to get as much signal cable as I can from work (scored about 150 ft of 12 conductor, double shielded cable a while back, perfect for LR front, LR rear and LR sub preouts from the deck, all in one cable) and RCA ends are relatively cheap, even for good ones. for the price of a nice set of cables, you can make a set that you never have to replace, because you can just fix them if they break.

 

I've made some wire for my car. It worked OK, but doesn't compare to the sonic details a good high end cable can offer.

JohnVroom, the Kimber KCAG interconnect has been installed in my car. [img]smile.gif[/img] (Long term loan)

I think most people will be more than happy with home made wire. High end pre-fab wire should be used once all other aspects of a system are optimized.

Adam

[ May 13, 2004, 10:14 AM: Message edited by: PEI330Ci ]

 

And you have nothing left to waste your money on.
[img]tongue.gif[/img]

The nice thing about home made interconnects is the fact that you can custom make the lenghs.

[ May 13, 2004, 02:57 PM: Message edited by: JRace ]

 

Dan makes a really good point about shielded vs. non-shielded cables in his tests here.

They brought it up again in this very recent thread here.