Speaker Cable

It is finally here!!! Everyone can stop asking about it and start buying it. I have been tweaking this design forever. I have gotten it to a point where I am proud to start selling it. It is like my "Silver Dragon Interconnect", an all silver solid core design. It is made up of 8 conductors, each conductor is 22awg grouping of stranded pure 99.99% solid silver. The conductor is a combination of several diff size silver wires. This combination of sizes was developed to give the best possible sound through the High, Mid and Low Frequencies. It is a braided geometry created to ward off unwanted airborne noise. 2 layers of Tecflex are molded around it to protect this geometry and give it good looks. The Spades are Cardas top of the line CCMS 9R. 9mm Mike Culver milled spade, billet Copper, Rhodium over Silver plate. These wont break like those flimsy other spades.

The Black Dragon has been designed to compliment our silver line. We had many requests from our customers who had systems where silver just wasn't an ideal fit. So we set out to make the best possible copper cables per there request. What we ended up with exceeded our wildest dreams. An extremely smooth transparent and not all together too warm cable. For years, my hearing tastes have always driven me in the direction of silver. I have never quite gotten into the sound of copper. Well that has now changed. I tried to build a cable that gave me the great detail and presence of silver but also provided me with the smooth jazzy sound of copper. The Black Dragon does just that. Only your ears can be the judge.

We took what we learned from the Silver Dragon Speaker cables. In which we developed just the right ratio of different size stranding to optimize the sound. What we ended up with was a new geometry using a special stranded grouping. The copper stranding are all 99.9999% high quality low crystalline structure pure copper. There are 4x11awg conductors. A standard run will yield approximately 2x6awg conductors and the Biwire will yield 4x11awg conductors. It is an internal Biwire design which will help cut cost for those of you that want to run Biwire. We continued to use Teflon coating, as it is an obvious best dielectric. We then cover it in a protective layer of Tecflex and solder your connector of choice. As you can tell our favorite connector of choice is the Cardas CCMS silver plated billet copper spade. We can also do their new Solid Silver CCMS or GRS spade at an additional cost. But offer several other choices. The end result is amazing....

This is Cardas's entry level cable, but don't let that statement fool you. This is a wonderful cable and is in the same class as the DH LabsT14. The difference? It sounds different. The T14 has a more forward sound which I recommend if a system is too laid back and warm. The Cardas is the opposite. If you feel your system is to forward or you have a metal dome tweeter in your speaker that seems a bit harsh, than this cable can solve those issues for you. It is more neutral than the DH Labs T14, with an open sound that focuses on detail.

In Shotgun form this makes an excellent passive sub cable. It has a low inductance and resistance and even high damping. The cable is very flexible and light weight. It is a Multi-gauge, Golden Section, and Constant Q conductors are used. The four conductors and cotton stranding are then wrapped in Teflon Tape. It has a flame retardant EEA and cotton for the dielectric, with pvc jacket, making it CL 2 rated. This means it makes an excellent in wall cable for home theater set ups. It is the only cable by Cardas you can buy in bulk.

Silver Sonic T-14 High Resolution speaker cable was designed by D.H. LABS to provide the highest quality sound at a much lower price than competing cables. It uses the finest materials available, including silver, oxygen-free copper and a pure Teflon dielectric.

Silver Sonic T-14 speaker cable has a very low capacitance of 21.5 pico-farads per foot. The inductance is also very low, which allows consistent performance with a wide variety of speakers. In fact, A ten foot length of this cable has less inductance than the output stages of many amplifiers! Vibration damping spacers and a tensioned wrap under the jacket hold the conductors tightly in place, and the cable is completely free from resonance's and microphonic effects that cause a loss of resolution. From the deepest bass to the highest treble, T-14 provides the most transparent sound possible, with precise imaging and a large, deep sound stage.

I offer 4 different versions: Standard, Biwire, Shotgun and Biwire Shotgun. Most speaker cables combine the positive and negative cables together. I have discovered with the Biwire, Shotgun and Biwire Shotgun, by separating the Positive and Negative cable from each other there is an improvement in the sound quality. If you want the Biwire setup with the positive and negative wires combined like the most standard biwire setups, I will do this at no additional cost. All Shotgun Setups will remain separate, but can be combined for an additional fee.

I have 3 standard terminations I use. Shown below. I can however order almost another brand termination you desire. Example: Cardas, WBT. Cardas will offer the best matching sound signature to the T14 cable. The Cardas Spades are silver plated copper with an additional plating of rhodium to prevent tarnishing.

Speaker Cable Configurations:

First lets go over the cable I use. It is DH Labs T14 which is a silver plated copper cable that has 2 14AWG leads in it. In a Standard setup, one T14 cable is used per speaker, or one pair of T14 per system, this is the norm. Biwiring is when you run 2 pairs of cable from your Amp/Receiver to 1 pair of speakers. There are 2 methods of configuration for Biwiring. In both configs usually you will tie 2 of the cables together at the Amp end, unless you have an Amp with 4 pair of binding posts rather than 2 pair. At the speaker end you will then have 4 leads per speaker, rather than 2 like in the standard setup. You can either use one cable to run all the positive leads, one for the positive high pass crossover (tweeter) and the other for the positive low pass crossover (midbass/bass). The other method is where you use one cable for the positive and negative high pass crossover (tweeter)and the other cable for the low pass crossover (midbass/bass). In the first setup the cables are independent of each other physically and for the second method you must tie the 2 cables together at the amp end unless you have the extra binding posts on your amp. I prefer the first method on my system I have found with all the pairs of speakers I have this sounds the best. The properties of the cable are actually diff in these 2 scenarios but that is a whole other topic of discussion and will not be covered here. I would try both to see which works best for you.

Now what Biwiring does is; it first splits the signal up and separates the speaker drivers from each other this prevents intermediation, generated by one driver, to influence the other driver. If you look at the damping factor that reduces the unwanted signals however you will find that they differ very little with or without cables (weather they are 0' vs 15' long cables for example). With a tube amplifier, the cable has no influence at all on dampening the signals from one side of the filter to the other. The damping factor is too low already at the power amp. The signal will influence the other driver, despite the cables. A well-designed crossover filter will provide a certain protection against "leaking" intermediation. Since each half of the filter (in a two-way system) will damp each half of the frequency range.

Another point in using double cables is the ability to choose separate cables that are especially suitable for each half of the frequency range. On the other hand, there are cables made along these lines without being double. (Monster, MIT, and others) even if they do not work as the manufacturers claim, they have this in common, that for each frequency range, or level, they have different strand (different materials, areas, winding techniques and such) that are parallel connected. If you assume that the signal always takes the easiest path, the right strand will be chosen automatically. This is the point with DH labs Q10. However I found that there was not a big diff in sound with the Q10 over the T14. I found the first Biwire setup, I talked about earlier to sound better than the second setup as well as the Q10. And the T14 is allot cheaper than the Q10. I feel the only plus to the Q10 the fact that it is all contained in one jacket. But the T14 can be run through a jacket of Techflex to offer the same point, and for that matter it looks more attractive and you can still separate the cables properly for the 1st setup technique.

There is sometimes a disadvantage to Biwire. One thing that happens when you biwire your loudspeakers is that the input of the high- and the low-pass filters are fed with different input signals. The difference is a result of the high frequencies and the low frequencies being forced to travel different paths, perhaps through different types of cables, but under all circumstances through cables who have seen different loads (a tweeter with a high pass filter has a completely different impedance response compared to a woofer with a low pass filter!). What happens is that the drivers wont work as good together as if the crossover was fed with equal signals. The result is a generation of more static and stochastic phase error sounds at different directions from the loudspeaker. The stochastic phase error sounds appear because there may be different types of unlinearities in the low- and high-frequency paths.

What does this sound like? Well, usually, just as you may expect from physics, it appears as a change in the reproduction of space and soundstage. Often, the first impression is that the "biwired" sound presents extended "dimensions", more "air", and is more "living". The impression after a week or month, however, is that all recordings sound very much alike, and the "airiness" appears on all records. It does not even sound like air anymore, instead more like a slime that pollutes every record you play. No wonder, since it is not a real, recorded quality but a "speaker characteristic" added to all reproduced material. "Sameness" is another word for it.

So are you more confused as to which direction to go. More times than none Biwire is the way to go. But if you have the time and energy try both. There are 2 more setups worth mentioning. Shotgun and Biwire Shotgun. If you found that having the high and low pass tied together sounds the best, then Shotgun is the way to go in my opinion. Shotguning is when you use an entire run of T14 for your negative post and one for the positive post. So 4 runs of cable is used like the biwire setup, only the leads are not split at the speaker end, they are tied to one termination. To add another option to this, replace that cheap piece of brass that is used as a jumper with 2 short runs of T14. Use Spades as the termination method for the Shotguns and banana's on the jumpers. This is how I have my speakers setup. Shotgun runs are also an excellent choice for passive subs. The larger the driver the large the power demand. Don't create a bottle neck for that sub. The 2 leads of T14 tied together gives you about a 10Awg cable. Plenty for a large sub.

The last setup is the Biwire shotgun. This is where you use 8 runs of T14 for your setup. All wires run independent of each other. 4 cables per Biwireable speaker. I recommend this on larger multi driver speakers. On a 2 way with a 6" driver this is probably over kill.

Bulk Price: $4.75/ft

for Bi-Wired systems. If you are not using Bi-Wired speaker cables, at least use

For those who are in to vintage gear we have several types of connectors that can fit your needs.