Cable Asylum: Some notes/thoughts on "home depot"/Halloween-14 speaker cable by PeAK

This post concerns the Home Depot 14 gauge extension cord that has been re-christened as speaker cables (by the likes of TAS) by cutting off the three prong male ends.

Even though I swore that my next cable would be JR cross connected 89259 ones, a trip to HD to buy flooring resulted in me purchasing this extension cord out of sheer curiosity to complement my inexpensive stable of speaker cables that get lent out to my friend's and family who hanker for something better (than zip cord) but give me a queer eye when I talked about adding (amplifier draining) a multi-colored braided CAT5 cable to their speakers. Not!

Notes/Thoughts

Markings:
Commercial Electric, 14 Gauge, 15 amp ultra-flexible -50 degree C Cold Weather Cable. Made in China.
Orange with black stripe running entire length of cord
SJTW E92770 VW-1 14AWX3c FT2
Preparation Time :
20 minutes (4x5minutes). 5 minutes for each end to cut to length, strip back orange sheathining by 3", strip black/white wires to bare copper. Leave 3" of green safety wire for battery bias experiments, later.
If you need only about 8 feet for each run. Leave about 4 feet connected to the male plug end so that you can create a upgraded power cord than only needs an IEC connector.
Directionality :
With the markings running away from the amplifier. I used the "black" wire as the hot. More natural sounding(than white). If you you use "white", you will need to burn-in the cable longer to get to nearly the same state (but always shy of the right direction ). Choose absolute phase by flipping connections at the speaker end.
Sound: Sounds very tuneful and natural in the bass region. Elsewhere, it lacks a bit of detail and transparency, yet it has no artifice in the voice and allows the amp to play loud with not fatigue. As TAS put it, "highly listenable and involving". The high hat at first sounds recessed (compared to other brighter cables) but you the delicacy of the strike and I now hear the damped decay of it being played by being held after being struck (Cowboy Junkies, "Dreaming my Dreams with You"). It gets to stay in the main rig for the next two weeks.
Why(does it sound like it does?) :
When I first saw the letters SJTW...this cable reminded by of the Belden SJT power chords that are default recommendations by Bob Crump to people looking for something better. That impession continues to stick. Just like the power chords, it is not the last word transparency but it is not that far behind. The low temperature plastic is very supple and flexible and binds the three conductors(black, white, and green) in a very stable triangular/pyramid arrangement/cross-section. So the cable should be mechanically very stable and resonant free. I suspect that this cable maybe very insensitive to the effects of feedback/microphonics and rf(outer orange sheat binding signal current wires together for low cross-sectional area flux loop)that come into play in the sensitive midrange region.

Other than the copper being somewhat shiny and bright (no tarnished look), the wires themselves looked to be standard zip chord. I suspect that this cable would serve as a very good stock for power chord upgrades.

I suspect that using teflon via Belden 89259 Risch cables can raise the bar...but for now I get a feeling of altered "Deja Vu" by going back to cables that go against the current grain of thinking that began about 15 years ago with the early cables that suggested that stranded copper wires had limitations that could be "altered" with exotic geometries and wire build.

In retrospect, I apologize to Paul Seydor of Absolute Sound for questioning his recommendation of this cable...it just seem so out of character for a publication such as TAS (even if it were the holy grail) to recommend or consider such a avenue/product. It definitely took some courageous discussions to broker even mentioning it a magazine in which HP's initials still appear...changing of the guard ?

As Paul said when he signed off his comments in TAS :

"Iâ€™ll leave the last observation to the most technically knowledgeable, musically literate, and experienced of my listening group:

â€œ You know whatâ€™s really good about this cable? It sounds totally unscrewed around with. â€ "

PeAK