Tweaker's Asylum

Posted by Jon L (i) on May 23, 2000 at 14:00:30:

Boy, I made this cord months ago, and it's been in my system feeding various things like tuners and crossover, but I've only recently did a serious A-B on my amplifiers, and lemme tell you, if you want a great power cord cheap, go make yourself this cord. This is a "cheater's" CAT5 cord and much easier to make than the speaker cable recipe.
I believe this thing needs quite a while to break in properly, and now I'm finally seeing the results. On amplifiers (tried on my VAC as well as Spectron), I couldn't believe my ears how good this cord turned out to be. I've been using TG HSR-i squared on my VAC renaissance and Audience powerChord on my Spectron, and I did some A-B ing recently against these tremendous commercial cords, which are stunning performers, especially on amplifers. I actually thought in the beginning the CAT5 was outperforming the TG-HSR i squared!! Well, upon careful listening, the TG turns out to be superior, but that CAT-5 cord is great stuff, probably matching my Audience powerchord's performance. It also has the TIGHTEST bass, even more so than TG, which has apparent more bass extension though.

Soudn via CAT5 cord on amp:
effortless
super tight, fast bass, giving up a bit of extension in bass to TG.
full, rich midrange, giving up some sense of refinement and inner detail compared to TG.
overall a "sunny" tonality compared to TG. Similar to Audience.
Detailed and "bright" in a good sense, opening up the system, not harsh or grainy.
Great extension top-to-bottom, giving up a bit of uppermost "air" to TG.
Dynamic--macrodynamic matching Audience and TG. Giving up a bit of microdynamics to TG.

How to build one easy: I know Chris doesn't recommend this stuff for power cord b/c too many things can go wrong. Here's what I did. I used Six lengths of CAT5(each length has PVC jacket and 8 twisted pairs of wire). I don't remove the PVC to protect against inadvertent electrical shorts. I braid the six lengths, using 2 lengths per each leg of the braid. You only braid ONCE! AT the end, you still do have to separate the colored ones together and clear ones together and combine each (BE VERY careful and thorough here). Basically, I forgo the ground and use each bundle for hot and return.
This is MUCH simpler and easier to build than the CAT5 speaker recipe and definitley worth it from performance/price ratio as well as on absolute performance scale. Just remember that I'm comparing it to TG HSR-i squared, which has bested everything on amps for me.