Excellent progress.
I find heating the wire first, then touching the solder directly to the iron’s tip, and transferring the solder to the wire works well.
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Thanks Elk. I kind of figured that out after a while. Still tricky business, though. I was told to use Kester solder since it’s easier to work with than silver solder. It this correct?
Kester is a manufacturer of nice quality solder. The typical solder is 60/40 (tin/lead) which is easier to work with than silver solder due to its lower melting point. Of course, as audiophiles, we are convinced silver solder will sound better.
I suggest also that you get some tip tinner for retinning your soldering iron tip.
Another point: The white smoke is vaporized resin flux and this helps us know where the soldering fumes are so as to avoid them. There are little fume extractors for the purpose if you start doing soldering more than just occasionally.
Well I’ve given it another go with the shielded interconnects using the Duelund DCA20GA wire. Specifically, I re-terminated the cables with the Kester solder and new RCA Switchcraft plugs. I just didn’t have much confidence in my initial solder job with the silver solder, honestly. The Kester turned out to be much easier to work with, as Elk predicted. Then I burned the cables in with the Hagerman Labs FryBaby2 unit. As per the instructions, I initially did a voltage burn and let that go for a couple days. Then I switched to the voltage burn and did that for a couple more days. And wow, what a difference!! The IC’s now sound great with great tone and clarity. Gone is the slightly muffled and lean sound I got initially. The bass is much better defined and the mids and highs are smooth as silk. No etching at all. They sound very close to my Silnote shielded phono cable, which I love. I’ll have to do a little more side-by-side comparison to see which I like better, but the fact is I can make some interconnects that actually sound pretty damn good. And for pretty cheap, too!
Well done and a nice report.
Making cable is very satisfying. Probably more so than it should be. 
Please let us know if you make an unshielded pair and have an opportunity to compare them.
So after switching back and forth between my homemade shielded Duelund 20GA interconnects and my Silnote Morpheus Reference II Series II IC’s, I think I like the Duelund IC’s. It’s close, but I think I get a little more musicality out of the homemade IC’s. They both sound great throughout the frequency spectrum, but the Duelunds sound just a little better and it’s hard for me to put my thumb on why. So I’m going with musicality in absence of another explanation. At the very worst they sound equivalent and I have a little expectation bias going on. I doubt it though. Bottom line: the Duelund wire is no joke, especially for the money. I can say the same thing about the FryBaby2. It’s a great little unit.
Are you still using the Duelund DCA16GA wire as speaker wire? I am currently using Mogami W3103 (12GA) but have the Dueland DCA16GA wire coming in the next day or so. It is my understanding that it works best twisted together at 3 or 4 twists per foot.
I got started down this path by the guy that built my preamp. He has used DCA20GA to make unshielded interconnects and he really likes the results. Again, using 3 or 4 twists per foot. Depending on the how the speaker cable experiment goes, I may try some interconnects made from Deuland wire.
Yeah, I still am running the Duelund wire and loving it. It’s the best bargain in speaker wire I know of. I haven’t tried the 3-4 twists per foot, myself. I use a zip tie every meter or so to keep them together. This might seem elementary, but be sure to mark the wires before you run them so you don’t get confused!
After having made a few sets of the interconnects, I have noticed a few things. First, they sound pretty good and are indistinguishable from my Nordost Red Dawn RCA’s or my Silnote shielded phono cables. Second, my skills at soldering leave a lot to be desired. It’s nowhere near as easy as it looks! I’m a careful and meticulous guy and it’s hard. I need better technique, I’m sure. Third, my time is too valuable to waste soldering!!
Thanks!
I made up the Dueland speaker cables a hour or so ago. Yes, I marked the ends of one wire in each pair so I would make no mistakes hooking them up. I used bare wire connections at both ends as I am told that sounds best. I’ll let them burn in for a while before I do any critical listening but so far they sound good!
How are you burning in your cables? I ran mine for a while with normal play and they did sound a bit better after a few weeks, although they were very good right off the bat. In order to break in the interconnects, I got the FryBaby2 and broke both the interconnects in and the speaker wire. Even after the speaker wire had been played for almost a month with pretty heavy play, I noticed they sounded more full after cooking with the FryBaby. Apparently it also will break in a phono stage as well, although that makes me a little nervous, honestly!
And let me know if you think they sound better with the twist versus un-twisted once they are broken in, if you can. I’d do it myself, but the thought of digging out the cables makes my head hurt!
Now that the wires are twisted, I am unlikely to undo them.
I have 9 hours on the wires now and they sound pretty darn good. The mid range and treble are more present and better sounding with the Dueland wire. The sound is brighter with being too bright. The bass seems just as powerful but tighter. I had read this wire works best with efficient speakers which is what I have.
I am burning in the wire by playing music. I don’t have anything like the FryBaby2.
I have another 12 hours or so on the Duelund DCA16GA wire and I have to say that it is sounding better than yesterday. I’ll give it a couple of weeks and then put the old Mogami wire back in place and listen.
In the meantime, I have ordered some Duelund DCA20GA wire and a couple of sets of Furutech FP-126(G) RCA connectors to make a couple of sets of RCA interconnects.
Be sure to run the Mogami back in before listening and making any judgments.
Okay, I now have several hundred hours on the Duelund DCA16GA speaker wire and unshielded Duelund DCA20GA RCA and XLR (2 wires) interconnects I made. I have to say that I am quite impressed with sound I am now getting out of my system. The change is so much better I don’t know where to begin.
The speaker wire got rid of some muddiness and lack of intensity in the bass and lower midrange. Clarity was improved throughout the frequency range. The interconnects added intensity to the midrange and treble. It was a bit too much at first but after 20 hours it sounded fantastic. Macro and microdynamics improved noticeably as well. All of this was done without affecting the black background. They still retained the analog-like sound that I love from the DirectStream DAC.
I couldn’t be happier with the Duelund speaker wire and interconnects…and they were so inexpensive to make. I used Cardas Quad Eutectic Silver solder with rosin flux.
Great work guys. I have done something similar. I bought two 300 hundred foot rolls of 12 gauge single strand silver tinned copper. Not sure on the % content of silver. Teflon very thinly insulated with color options. Costs about a dollar a foot from Surfcables.com . Very nice wire to work with. I replaced the paired #10 copper wire in my speaker towers and made up four twenty foot spaeker cable runs for the four towers. Two towers on the M 700 and two on the BHK 250 IC to the BHK pre amp via a Y xlr configuration. So i guess my room is bi-amped not my speaker. Sounds pretty good but i wish i didn’t twist the speaker wire …going to get untwisted soon. The BHKs and speaker wire have about a 100 hours burn in. The M700 about 200 hours. I had planned to sell the M 700s and Stellar Gain Cell Dac when i got the the BHKs but now I am just going to trade the Stellar Dac in for a DSD Dac Jr so I can get firmware upgrades. I like the options of just using the solid state M700 amps for non critical listening or background music while cooking. And just the BHK for emotional listening. And occasionally add them together for the jam. I was having difficulty getting the bi amped room syncopated. I tried speaker positioning and alternating. Took the Rels feed off one amp onto another. Added some acoustic dampening. Put the amperage sucking BHK 250 back onto the P5 power regenerator. But I think what finally gelled it together was when I upgraded the firmware on the P5. By turning the master switch off on the P5 to pull the SD card and reload it a couple of times.I ended up powering all the seperates on and off via the master P5 as i didn’t turn off all the individual units. For whatever reason this seemed to tune the bi amps into sounding better together than before. 
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The longtime contributor on the Audiogon forums named “Grannyring” recommended Western Electric 10 gauge for speaker cable as a possibly better sounding alternative to the new production Duelund cable. He and I seem to share similar tastes so I ordered a pair of 15 foot cables from Ebay: http://stores.ebay.com/jakesoldwesternelectricstuff/ This cable was manufactured during the 80-s -90’s and is pretty flexible. Stripping the tightly woven cotton fabric jacket neatly is a little trickier than usual. I first cut the jacket with a new razor knife to start a clean cut and then finished the stripping with the usual wire stripper pliers. Then I used an inch of red or black heat shrink to designate polarity on each cable. I took one strand of the stripped wire and tied off the end of the wire bundle and looped it up tight about an 1/8 of inch from the end. I tinned just enough of the bundled end with WBT 4% silver solder to stop stray wire from separating and then snipped the tinned ends off neatly. Performance of this cable is supposed to be enhanced using it unterminated apparently. After an hours work or so, you’re ready to go. These cables display every virtue you’ve read about, amazing cables for $65.00 in parts costs! The main thing I like about these cables is that they have detail without hyping the treble excessively. They sound very natural, like upper instrument frequencies sound in a good concert hall.
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When you strip the cable, am I correct in assuming you’re just stripping a short portion at each end rather than the entire cable?
