Speaker rewire

I will post further listening impressions over the weekend, in the meantime here is the result of the Spatia rewire. The thicker wire is running to a super tweeter, all the others are stripped back to individual conductors. The 4 midrange drivers are wired in pairs. From the positive binding post into one driver positive terminal. Negative out to positive in the other driver and negative back from the second driver to the negative binding post. This maintains the correct impedance. The capacitor protects the ribbon tweeter. There are no crossovers, it is done digitally.

For anyone else considering a speaker rewire (ie Jon), I have a few comments. This may be obvious but I will list my experience nevertheless…. 

a. Please be very careful when stripping the outer sheath so you don’t cut through into the conductor insulation. This is if you decide to slit lengthways and pull the conductors out sideways

As a safer alternative but time consuming, use a blade to cut partway through the insulation at right angles to the length, round the circumference about 75mm from the end. Then slightly bend the cable to ‘break’ this ring away. It can be easily slid along and off the end. Repeat until all done. Slow but no stress to the cable and less risk of the blade nicking the inner insulation. 

b. Don’t pull the inner cable pair hard as you are removing them from the outer sheath - you may stretch and stress the conductors & the insulation.

For anyone else indenting to do this exercise, I would recommend asking/paying GSP to strip back the outer sheath so you purchase just the conductors. Good to give them a little more income too.

c. Follow John C’s example by putting small pieces of blue insulating tape at the signal end of each piece you cut. Once out of the sheath, you will not be able to identify directionality without doing this.

d. It’s best to use a proper cable stripping tool when terminating the ends prior to soldering.

e. The two conductors have an underlined, but very narrow number 1 and number 2 printed regularly along the length to aid channel identification. As they alternate reading from left-right-left-right etc, you cannot use this to determine directionality