During my vacation in France I bought myself again some rolls (10m) of flexible power wire. This is something I do in France because 2.5mm flexible wire is used (and CE approved) in French houses. Well, to be accurate, they sell even bigger stuff: 4, 6mm and 10mm are available also, be it in limited range of colors. Now I was looking for a suitable way to twist or braid this wire to one power cable.
Of-course I knew about commercial designs where lots of knots were included, e.g. NBS, and this was supposed to be essential for the design. Capacitance and induction may have a beneficial effect on high-frequency noise. And as mains filters are not ideal for most power amps, having a power cable that helps in this area is great.
Apart
from that, making twists, knots and braiding will make cables less prone to
RF noise anyway and that was the reason I was looking for a new design to try
in our vacation home. Not that we had any Hifi equipment there that would fit
these cables, but for bringing them home to the Netherlands.
Well anyway ...
There are moments where you need some luck as well: While buying some toys for the kids I noticed some packages with colored wires of 50cm long (about 10 colors in one plastic kit). On the outside it was marked with "Fabrique tes scoubidous" which meant that it contained a small booklet explaining how to make your own scoobidoos.
So while a part of the family were making French scoubidous with all kind of colored wire for their shoelaces, keyhanger etc. some others were building a Scoobidoo power cable of 5 wires (2.5 mm each).
So what do you need, besides perhaps the same scoubidou kit as a manual? I bought CE approved wire on the roll (10m each) for € 4.00 euro each. And maybe you could do with less, but on the other side 5 rolls are enough for just 2 power cables of 1.5 meters in length.
So you'll need lots of wire. No kiddin'. For every meter of scoobidoo power cord you'll need about 3.5-4.0 meters of wire to start with. Except for the earth wire, that one is straight and takes 1 meter of course.
I
really should refer you to the original French scoubidou manual, cause it explains
better than I can how to make a scoobidoo.
Start with 5 wires and bundle them with a tie-wrap (really tight). Use the green/yellow wire as a center wire and build the scoobidoo with the remaining 4 wires. I used one red, one blue and two black wires. Lay each wire to another direction (one north, one south, one west and one east), and build the first knot as shown on the picture on the right.
In this case, a loop was made with the two black wires and after that the blue and red wire were stuck through the opening.
In the picture is shown how to make every successive knot (building on the existing twist shown in the center) until the cable is long enough. Each wire stays on the same side of the central earth wire and while bending back and forth goes over the first wire it crosses and under the second. Shown on the picture, when bending the red wire southwards, it goes over the first black wire going from east to west and under the second black wire going from west to east. The blue one the same from south to north it goes over the lower black cable and under the upper one.
All
right? Then pull all 4 the wires real hard in order to fix the knot.
You'll have to pull real hard in between the several knots in order to get the cable to become solid without all kinds of loose ends. On the other hand, from experience I can tell you not to pull too hard because blisters will be your reward for working too hard.
When you're out of wire - this moment may come sooner than the
moment that you think the cable is long enough - fix the connectors.
NOTE: Pay
attention when taking two leads together. If you take the wrong ones together
you will create a short-circuit. Please have a look at the pictures above to
get an impression of the braiding process.
After all is done, I might use a braided sleeve for finishing this cable. On the other hand, since I used so many nice colors there is no immediate need for another finish of this cable other than that over time it will collect more dust than the average flat cable.
Since you need wires of 5 meters length to make a cable of 1.20 meters, making the knots is awfully difficult in the beginning. Therefore, make your life easier with the following trick: make all 4 twisting wires of the same length (5 meters) and with a tie-wrap fix all 4 together halfway at 2.5 meters. Then first make one halve of the power cable and when done, cut the wrap and make the remaining halve.
OK, it's simple, but it'll save you lots of wire handling and some blisters too :-)
There is another (there are more) way to make your knots: The "round" version. We're making a round Scoobidoo version also. Too early to tell whether there are more differences such as wire usage or sound differences.
Stay tuned, we're doing our best to make another 1.2 meters of power cable.
I
don't think so, twisting and braiding techniques usually protect the cable against
stray magnetic influence (and will make the cable less influential on others).
And apart from the obvious 50Hz humm that will occur if you position you power
cables too close to interconnects (especially in parallel) which is not cured
by shielding but by distance only, there is hardly any benefit from shielding
power cables.
But please, go ahead and shield your version of the Scoobidoo and tell me about it. I normally make a shielded version of any cable anyway.
Last year I had the vandenHul Mainsstream power cable connected to my Marantz CD17mkii cdplayer. Two weeks after returning from vacation I decided to give the Scoobidoo a try.
So I connected the cable and left it there for at least 4 weeks. And I must say, I cannot keep the Mainsstream and the Scoobidoo apart (by listening I mean obviously). Now I do trust my own ears ever since I was able to keep mp3 coded music and original CD's apart in a contest (Annemarie and I were the only ones). So I asked Annemarie to listen while I switched cables without telling her what cable was playing. Neither of us could hear any difference which is a good sign since I like the sound of the Mainsstream very much.
Of-course I should start now by bragging about all the benefits of the scoobidoo power cable, with fantastic imaging and earthshaking differences in microdetails.
But I don't ...
You better make a Scoobidoo yourself and give me your opinion. I'm most interested in feedback on this design since it contains more knots and twists than any other power cable I made before and it's capacity (and maybe inductivity) is higher than that of other cables I used.
version 1.0
© Maarten&Annemarie, 2003, 2004, 2006