Speaker cables from foil

[Mikeeo]

Hi All,

Had many moons ago planned to test speaker cables made of copper/silver foil and a construction based on Allen Wrights ideas. The rolles of Mundorf copper foil have been sitting in my diy cabinet for over a year. As I've been working heavy lately so I just took the day off and told my self that now it is time!
It is not an easy construction so it took me more than 5 hours to complete. I have a lot of practice from making cables with foil but only 1 m length for low level signal duties.
This time the foil is 28x0,07 mm and I made 2 m lengths. The + and - is as tight and flat together as possible with only 0,042 mm of polypropylene tape in between. Same tape is on the the outside of each foil. 
I soldered on silver plated beryllium copper bananas and thats it!

How does it sound?

Well, as I had hoped for due to earlier results with silver foil, excellent!

Another brake was released (recent brake release was with the 7.1.3) even more ease for the music flow, tighter and better resolved bass, more air around everything, micro details etc etc. They definitely beat the Ansuz C speaker cables I tested (retail GBP 5400).

Any one else tried foil based cables?  

A little picture with the glowing foils doing there stuff!

/Mike

Mike, can you tell us where you sourced the polypropylene tape, and part number? Although I have Allen's book, I would like to make sure I get your fantastic aspect! The foils are even thinner than Goertz's - this can only be good!

Hi,

Well I am not in Sweden at the moment but I will send the info asap I am back as I do not remember. 
Indeed I have the cookbook from Allen. I think the main idea behind the construction is that the foil is 'thin' ie 0,07 mm (and wide to get enough cross section) and also that dielectrica should be of ok low E and as thin as possible. And thin means that the conductors would be as close as possible.Instead of keeping conductors as far away as possible Allen flipped that concept and put them as close together as possible. I do think Allen said that thin was more important than E ie polypropylene was ok due to the thickness that could be had. I  also think it wasn't that easy to find that thin teflon with an adhesive.
So I bought into his theories and started looking for a thin as possible tape and I found a German made PP tape thinner than the one Allen used so I thought that would be a good start. I made several signal cables with silver foil and they trashed any other cable tested in my system (pre Devialet) and I even hardwired my tube preamp with these foils.

For a complete 1 ch cable I only use 3 runs of tape, 2 outer and one in between so that should result in minimal usage of an insulator.

The cable in the picture is more of a first tester, I'll make another soon and will dress that better and perhaps put a tight cotton mesh around it, do some better soldering job and add ons for stability and longevity. Perhaps even buy some wide silver foil or maybe Mundorfs silver/gold foil.

/Mike