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"Yet Another Home Depot" recommendation by TAS(long)

Posted by PeAK (A) on April 17, 2004 at 08:25:21

Not yet...but what follow below is (long) and basically comments on the new TAS direction and some background on other cables that have graced the status of everyman's Home Depot. Here goes...

Comments on TAS and HD

If DIY/Home Depot get even a brief mention again in the next issue we might begin thinking about coining a acronym (using the Unix-speak naming convention of prefixing "YA" for yet another )... YAHD...it does have a sort high-end ring to it ... one day we may see regular TAS column to reflect and legitimize the ground swell of DIY activities/forums. More probably it signals a new direction and what better way to gauge the reaction to "low" cost recommendations into Harry Pearson's bible.

My two cents on the DIY cable recommendation that concludes "not much more to be desired" is perhaps the equivalent to a slam dunk to partly stem the Musical Fidelity/Advertisers sacred cow discussions but... do not expect HP or RH to author the words...It seems as if TAS is willing to sacrifice some "writing" lambs (with questionable hearing) in the interest wider readership or maybe John Marks call for low cost equipment recommendations for Stereophile had something to do with it. Back to the cable farm...




1. Home Depot 14 Gauge "Halloween" Extention Cable

   The recent TAS recommendation of "black/organge" extention cord as speaker cabling is yet another new direction. It seems as if the person (Paul Seydor) recommending them is from the "old school" as he rates wires near the bottom of things to try for system tuning. The editor (Rober Harley) put in his editor's comment to say that he disagree with this view....however he fell short of actually passing judgement on the cable itself. Paul Seydor's position is somewhat legitimize by recording engineer Tony Faulkner's use of these cables or the reaction (here) would have been louder.
   

Home Depot/Lowe's THHN Background Info

I recently posted about using another (different) commonly available thermoplastic wire available at Home Depot as speaker cables.
I'm also aware articles dating back twenty years ago making similar recommedations (Internation Audio Review, Peter J. Moncrief recommends Columbia-Romex). So with the recent TAS article recommending "yet another" cable, I thought I might fill in some of the blanks on everyday "stock" at Home Depot that are mutter in the same breath as the word audio, soundstage, highs and lows....



1. THHN E5183 12 gauge

   Seems like the preferred version of thermoplastic is THHN E51583 made by Southwire. The TWN75 designation is an equivalent Canadian standard. It is constucted a tightly bonded PVC jacket surrounded by a clear nylon jacket supposedly designed to stem corrosion for 50 years.
   The wire first gained notice about two years ago (BFS) and picked up discussion in Harmonic Discord forum where no clear consensus could be reached and people came to the suggestion that it was due to different manufacturers (Cerro or Essex) or the use of different sized strands to decrease the overall wire diameter for the same gauge....this seems somewhat amusing now that variable strand is common in high-end designs for resonance distribution.

   Most of the past posts dealt with 12 gauge variants of E51583 as this was deemed empirically to be best.

   
   

2. BFS THHN 6 Gauge

   Martin deWulf readers at BFS haved picked up on the 6 gauge variant and seem to be going through the same loops as those at HD two years ago where YMMV results seem to be the norm ...partly due to the availability of different manufacturing sources for the same wire designation. Simplifying the design to 8 gauge can remove the need for spades and one step in assembly beyond cutting and stripping.
   
   The strange thing is that over the course of the last two years this thread on THHN was barely mentioned in AA.

PeAK

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