Cable Asylum: U-BYTE2 by AndrewG

Here are some experiences with U-BYTE2 speaker cables for your info:

I spent a few days with my buddy Lewis M. (Aussie loudspeaker legend and general audio guru - not yet in the internet age) making a rough prototype pair and comparing them to commercial cables and our own home-brewed cables before committing ourselves to the not-inconsiderable task of actually making enough sets to cable our systems. (Sheesh! Hope you can untangle the syntax of that last sentence! )

To cut a long and reasonably thorough bunch of tests down to size, the u-bytes convincingly beat everything - even very expensive commercial cables. Our final design has some tested and proven improvements Iâ€™d like to pass on to you:

Â·Instead of satellite cable (which we tested, by the way) we used a co-ax with nice soft annealed copper center conductor and air-gap dielectric. Chuck everything else away and use a 16-gauge Solo or Goertz flat copper foil speaker cable (or unroll an inductor) as the outer tubular conductor (rolled by hand into a tube along the length of the cable not spiraled around it! a slight overlap may occur, thatâ€™s fine). Sadly, this makes the cable even more difficult to make and even stiffer to use, but it sounds better.

Â·We tested heat-shrink in direct contact with the outer copper tube. Sounds pretty good, but it sounds better with a layer of expandable nylon braid (lots of air, not too much dielectric, you see) pulled very tight over the copper then heat-shrink to hold that in place. Even better is wrapping the copper in Teflon Gas-fitterâ€™s tape under the heat-shrink instead of expandable braid, but jeez thatâ€™ a pain to do! (I use 3.6 metre cables tri-wired!)

. We could hear no difference between the wire-wrap flying leads and leads made from a number of Cat5 inner strands braided together in Litz formation. At last! Something thatâ€™s easier!

Listening tests have been on diverse and very highly developed systems. Analogue, digital, solid-state, vacuum tube, single-ended and push-pull, large multi-driver systems, high-efficiency single-driver full-range systems and rear horn-loaded systems. Basically, these cables are the beeâ€™s knees, the duckâ€™s guts, choose your metaphor. I use Cat5 braided cable on another system and for short internal wiring on speakers I build, and itâ€™s very good stuff; but when I read all the posts on the audio asylum asking about or commenting about the finest tweaks for Cat5 cables, I feel like berating my VDU screen and yelling that everyone is wasting their time...The good stuff is in MY system you idiots! (humour)

Summary: They are smooth (free of grain and electronic artifacts). They resolve detail. They are extended. They are DYNAMIC! Explosively more dynamic than the best of the competition. They have astonishing bass grip. Most of all they are FAST, so much so that it has proven quite impossible to blend other cables with them in any part of my tri-amped / tri-wired (of course) system, even though I quite happily blend different amplifiers in same system! The disparity in speed made the system sound disjointed when I tried. (Experiment repeated elsewhere with the same outcome).

Now hereâ€™s the really good stuff:

Interconnects! Temporarily forget theory. Use the same construction technique as above, but replace the center conductor with a carefully stripped length of wire-wrap wire (one strand, insulation removed). Pull this through as you extract the copper, by soldering them together first. Cross-connect them as per standard u-byte construction. Terminate with short flying leads (wire-wrap is OK, but really, Cat5 strands sound better than wire-wrap which has a softening effect if the wire-wrap is still insulated). I use a special instrument wire which is physically tough to take the wear and tear imposed on a single strand flying lead at the end of a very stiff and uncooperative interconnect. Wrap with Teflon tape under the heat-shrink. Seal the ends to prevent surface tarnishing of the loosely fitting bare wire through the center.

Now, I know some electric circuit theory, and I am informed regarding the current state of opinion around the audiophile network regarding what is important in interconnect design and construction, so I realize that this sounds a little bizarre, but these things work! All the same qualities as the cross-connected speaker cables, especially speed.

Over long lengths capacitance might become a problem; I measure about 70 pF/M when made as above. Much higher if shielded with copper braid - about 200 pF/M.

In my tri-amped system I moved the very small output-coupling caps used for signal going to the treble amp from the valve pre-amp output to the power-amp input to avoid the voltage-divider effect of the original arrangement with shielded cables.

Lewis* even took a metre pair of this stuff into one of the high-end shops (he is well-known and respected). They had a private demo against their premium US-made $1600-00 per-metre interconnects. No comparison. I wish Iâ€™d been there to see their faces... (Talking about Lewis, remember the â€œFlatline 175â€ ribbon / dynamic hybrid from Stereofool recommended components about 5 years ago? They were Lewâ€™s babies, and I still have one of the early prototype pairs for occasional use)

Andrew G (Australia)