The Monoprice cable showed up today.
It was on a spool in the ad pics, but it's a loose coil as delivered. PITB to try and feed/pull, but I put a steel bar across two jacks stands and it's at least manageable. Still a PITB, just less so. Meh, the cable is otherwise as advertised. Well, some deviation (as described below) but it's essentially as described.
Tagged "made in Vietnam" which I thought was a little odd. "Made in China" is usually where this type of stuff comes from. Meh, matters not to me either way. It is what it is. All I care about at this point is how it works.
Made a couple interconnects for the first turntable to preamp:
Well, if nothing else, they sure do look purdy....
Don't be fooled by the physical size of that cable, it's not coax:
A lot of that thickness is just the rubber jacket. But I knew that when I ordered it and it makes for a nice transition between the cable size and the RCA plug opening (IE: 8 mm OD cable, 9 mm ID RCA plug). With the shield folded back over the OD of the insulation, it's makes for a nice push fit into the RCA opening. I soldered the center and shield to the plug, but there's also a grub screw for some mechanical "backup" to keep the cable in place.
The rubber is nice and pliable, so the cable is pretty flexible and easy to route and bend as needed. Kind of feels like a spark plug wire does.
The cable is advertised as 16 AWG. Ah yeah, that's a no. No matter how generous I was with the vernier, the wire wouldn't measure much more than 0.7-0.75 mm. That's somewhere around 19-20 AWG. Will still work fine for my uses, but it's still not exactly honest advertising. Might be 16 AWG if you twisted both center wires together.....
All the wires are indeed copper. That part of the ad was truthful. Supposed to be "OFC", but who knows if that's ever true. No matter who you buy it from, you're taking them at their word about that. It's copper, that's good 'enuff...
The "drain wire" seems to perhaps be something tinned (silver colored), but that is pretty much irrelevant in my use. It just got combined with the shield and black wire in my case.
I meter the roll and all 250 ft of it only returns 0.4 ohms on the shield, around 0.7-0.8 on the 20-ish gauge wires. I also did the cursory check to make sure there were no breaks or shorts and the 250ft roll came back good.
I did soldered connections. White center wire for pos and the black+drain with the shield for neg. The wire insulation (IE: white" really was sensitive to shrinking with heat so I had to watch for that. The insulator in the RCA plug was quite robust to heat resistance, so filling the solder cup was relatively easy for my weller WESD51 with the appropriately sized tip.
I give the old cables a listen on a LP, just to make sure I have a recent ref for sound (I don't have measuring equipment for signal). Swapped in my DIY cable and:
Quiet.
At least as quiet as the random RCA cable I had on there, same while playing. Same with the stylus lifted. No discernible difference to my old, damaged hearing at least. So that's a success as far as I'm concerned.
3D printed off some cable clips to help keep it organized:
Looks OK to me. The clips will be bonded to the back of the case for a neater routing than just hanging free.
The Preamp has the rca jacks in a group of 4 with 2 stacked vertically and while they're not touching, they're still fairly close. The black colored barrels metered as not conductive (likely the paint or powder coat or whatever the finish is), but I slipped a little piece of black vinyl tape between them, just for a little piece of mind. Gravity
IS a heartless biotch after all......
I also have 3D printed off various other clips for power cords, etc to clean it all up and run nicely.
Now to build more interconnects. Should take a month or so at my "leisurely" pace....retirement is good.
