Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Deep Dive M5

These M5hps continue to impress... I had a puttering mood fall upon me and messed with recabling the M5s.

I finally got into making some cables for them out of 18/4 twisted high spec belden cable. Extremely low capacitance and inductance. Higher resistance, but I planned on parallelling them. Bought a box special for re-feeding my basement towers eventually. So I turned 18/4 to 15/2 and fed the woofer and mid/tweet with parallel cables.

FAIL.

I used a drill and twisted two runs together to make a bi-wire 15/2 star quad out of the 18/4. Instantly regretted it and went over everything to make sure something wasnt wrong..... I had removed the jumper straps. Connections were tight. Hmmmm. The runs are the same length and short at 10’.

It was indeed the cable folks. I can hear cables in this system. It wasnt subtle. Shut the front door. They were even noticably quieter. Vocals were recessed. Bass was weaker.

I swapped the 10/2 belden back in to the woofers and swapped a run of provo 16/4 in star quad to each mid/tweet (top posts). Let the head scratching begin.

I dont know what to say except wow. I’m off meds or something.....

Custom cable setup 1- 1 run to each speaker 5T00UP belden 10/2 bulk from bluejeans with jumpers in. Nice bass weight. Lived with it for a long time liked it fine.

Custom cable setup 2- 2 runs to each speaker woofers and mid/tweet in star quad (turned 2x18/4 to 15/2) (bad): No bass. Flat vocals.


Custom cable setup 3- 2 runs to each speaker. Belden 5T00UP 10/2 from bluejeans to woofers and provo 16/4 in star quad to mid/tweet. Wow. Call me a convert.



Highly highly recommend the super cheap, readily available provo in star quad setup. Black/Red and White/Green. I always use it, but funnily enough never bothered with it at home in a biwire setup. Or a comparison.... The 10/2 on bass and 16/4 star quad on mid/tweet is baffling.

These M5hps are an awakening. Dumbfounded.

Let the flogging begin. Disgraced. Lol.

Mojo, shoot me a pm and I will send you a pair of the provo. I gotta have someone else try it. I know you have a keen ear. I feel crazy.

I’ll send the “crap” cable. Equivalent 12/2. And a “good” cable. Equivalent 13/2.

Thanks, Trevor. I'll shoot you an email. Can you link specs to the cables? I am particularly interested in the insulation material.

Belden 18/4
https://edesk.belden.com/products/techdata/english/pdf/5322UL.pdf

Belden 10/2
https://catalog.belden.com/techdata/EN/5T00UP_techdata.pdf

Provo 16/4
http://www.provowire.com/images/specs/Provo_Wire_Spec_PartNo_9164.pdf

I couldnt find the 7164 but seems they are pretty much the same.

Got message. Cut and boxed. Ship tomorrow. Sending pair of all 3.

Thank you, Trevor. I really look forward to this. I've dismantled "the lab" and have been enjoying music. Now I'm getting sucked back into analysis. I feel like I am in the mob, man.

I forgot to mention you may want to check what's in the "vicinity" of the cable routing. If there's anything with iron content along the routing, that will affect cable inductance (relative permeability). Air is best. Cable capacitance will also be affected (relative permittivity) by various oil-based products, glass, etc. To keep capacitance as low as possible, the cables ought to be surrounded by air. Concrete for example is 4 times more permittive than air making the capacitance 4 times greater so raising the cables off the floor may improve bass!

So how you route each cable is important. If you want to get really anal about it, you can't route one cable in the "vicinity" of the other even if the other is not powered.

The other things that matter to inductance and capacitance are the insulation, the distance between the two conductors and the cable length. The difference between the diameters of each conductor matters too but I'm quite sure the conductors for each cable are identical so that difference is nil.

Gotcha and well put. The cables were ran the exact same path for each iteration. Not a cabling routing issue I can say with certainty.

I am interested in what you find -if anything at all. Canada post is on the job now. Heading your way. Tracking in your email. Doesn't matter what you find I guess. We will be disproved by some oversight missed. Should be a fun read once you get to it.

I can say, superstition or no, that I wont be changing anything in this room now until I get my forever stands in place (it's been hinted Santa might bring me some). I now get the 180 degree effect you have been mentioning. Never experienced that before with 2 passive speakers alone without DSP involved. Pretty neat. Would honestly rather listen to music on this setup now over the basement with 7.2.4 ATMOS engaged. Just a nicer room to sit in with lights on and sounds utterly fantastic. Bragably good. Will sell more M5HPs for sure as I keep being asked by people what to buy right now. After a demo it's a lock.

Kudos to Andrew and Ian for making M5HP speakers so well they may serve as a lab tool for testing things upstream from them, and Me for setting up such a super duper room. LOL.

Another coworker apparently pulling the trigger on M5HPs. 4 orders now. Lol. Awesome.

See there's a couple pairs of M5HPs in the bstock on sale with 20% more off. Sure a great bargain for someone out there.

The cables are in a storage compartment at my community mailbox but the key Canada Post gave me won't open it. I have to call them.