Cable Asylum: REVIEW: DIY by Alan Maher Belden 89880 High Resolution Speaker Cable Cable by Lukpayat

This is a brief review of my new DIY cable. I will post follow up when I 100% satisfied with the performance of my systems. please excuse my bad writing style. It's very hard to describe sound subjectively. but I'll try my best.
Anyway,
If you haven't check out this DIY cable yet, you can go Alan's Webpage to get some idea on it.
Here's a little bit of a background of this cable. The Idea was originally from Alan (APM) at AVScience Forum . I believe it is a clone of a $1000 cable.

I posted a question asking what cable to get for 20' length since I need to move my rack to the side wall and I don't wanna use long interconnect. I was about to buy a pair of DHlabs silver sonic for almost 400 bucks. Then Alan suggested me to go DIY. I agreed and I was so fortunate to find some surplus belden 89880 at a very cheap price.
then he project begun.

This belden is actually a coax with dual braid and dual foil design with solid 12AWG copper core. The braid is tinned. outer jacket is Orange colored plastic. Retail is over a buck per foot. I got it for 10cents per foot! This cable is very stiff to work especially for Power cord construction. but that is another story. So, I Order some Audioquest copper spade, heatshrink, sleeving and pro gold from Mike percy audio. total cost, under 300 bucks and I got more than enough cable to make power cords, etc. (in fact, I did make 2 power cord from his webpage.)
There are several design in his webpage but I only tried 2 of them. the biwire and the shotgun cross connected speaker cable. but I only use the 20' pair shotgun cable for this review because my initial impression was better on the shotgun compared to the biwired version.

When I first Installed the cable in my system a few weeks ago, I was kinda dissappointed. I noticed that I lost bass weight, got thin midbass and brittle upper midrange. However, I do hear an expansion in soundstage and a more focus imaging.
I thought I should give it a few more days to settle down. After about 30 hours burn in, I went back to listen to it again. I'm glad I didn't throw it away. The upper midrange is now not as severely brittle as it was before, still "grainy" though. Midbass is lean but bit more articulate. I didn't have the powerfull bass that I experience with my old Cardas Quadlink 5C biwire.
As of Today, the cable has at least 80 hours on it. So, I think it is ready for a critical listening session. And last night, I spent several hours listening to some of my favorite cd. Surprisingly, after this cable has enough hours on it, it's started to show it real quality. Sarah maclachan voice never sounded so smooth and so real before. the "brittle" is now gone. vocal is very clear and seems like "detached" from the music. Music layering is outstanding. there's more air, more sense of space. you can easily localize where each instrument is located from the music. The low noise design of this cable really open up the sound a couple of notches up, it also brought up the low level resolution. Imaging and soundstage is greatly improved from my cardas. It's really kinda spooky to hear a sound like this where you can't tell where the speaker is located if you close your eyes.
I thought My system is at it max potential before I use this cable. I was wrong. This cable has stretched the performance of my system a few notches more.
So, if you are making this cable, don't be alarmed if your system sounded bad upon installing them. :)

However, my only complaint about this cable is the bass. eversince I first installed it, I lost the bass slam like I experience with my previous cable. The bottom end is still there, but it's just not as authoritive and powerfull as before. It has gained definition but lost weight. I have no idea what the hell that went wrong. may be my room/speaker placement may have contribute to this as well. I still need to work on this and Alan has been very helpful to me since I first started with this project.
may be this cable needs more hours on it. I also finish 2 sets of his powercord made from the same cable. I hope this will help the bottom end problem of my speaker.

All in all, I think this cable is worthy of my time and effort. It is a very revealing even though I'm still not 100% satisfied with it, I believed something can be done to tackle the lacking bass problem. I currently playing with placement and so far it helps a bit. I have yet to try Jon's recipe as well the Cat 5 cable. may be in the next project.
A special thanks to Alan for being very helpful and patience during the process.

the Listening is done in a 18'x15'9' semi-dedicated HT/music room. Speaker is placed at 4'3" out into the room. 3'8" from side wall measured from the middle of the woofer. seating is 2' from back wall. No room treatment.

Enjoy the music

REVIEW: DIY by Alan Maher Belden 89880 High Resolution Speaker Cable Cable Review by Lukpayat at Audio Asylum