I've been promising to do this for a while.....it was going to be an article but I never seem to have the time to do the photo's and drawings. So this is a generic IC cable that should not cost more than £30 whatever conductors you use. In my estimation 20% of the sound of an IC is determined by the plugs you fit. For this cable I would suggest you get the Nuetrik plugs with the cable gripper, these are not the "profi" ones and should cost about a £1 each. The next 60% of the sound is determined by the type of conductor/insulator you use. Now I'm not going to tell you whats right or wrong, but for myself I much prefer silver to copper and solid core to stranded. If you decide on copper Maplin do a range of enamelled copper wire which is ideal [just make certain you scrape enough of the polyeurathane of the wire to make a connection]. A roll of this should cost about a £5, I'd get 0.5 or less thinner is better but its an absolute pig to work with. I tend to use 0.5mm silver or smaller but you need to insulate each conductor. The last 20% is determined by the topology used, ie how many conductors and what form the cable takes, do you bother with shielding? I suggest for a beginner start simple .... So this is what I suggest ..... You need to decide your prefered conductor, then this case I'm going to take about silver in ptfe sleeve, but it could be copper or anything else you fancy...platinum is a bit pricey these days and mercurys awkward to work with [and toxic]. So the simplest IC you can make is two wires in parallel, but that provides no RF/EMI rejection. So you need to twist the two cores tightly together. By hand this is a pain but if you have a hand drill make a 2" disc with a bolt through it and at 180 degress cut two notches. Take your two conductors and anchour one end in a vice or under a heavy rock or similar, at the other end [I normally do 2-3m at a time] secure the wires in each notch. Spin the drill keeping the wires taught, till you can feel the drill begin to be pulled towards the vice. You should have about full twist every 5mm [if you started with wires about 1.5mm each in diameter]. Cut to length ie about 0.75m seems to be standard, but a shorter one will sound better if you can get away with the reduced lenght. Unwind about 10mm at each end and strip back to expose the conductors....if you clever the insulation that you have used will be of different colours make id easy. If not use a multimeter to id what will become signal and ground. Take your desired plug and use a good soldering iron and tin the ends of the twisted wires. Fit these according to the type of plug your using and then solder to the appropriate pins, centre pin is always hot or signal the ground could be a tag or even the cable clamp assembly. The neutriks are the tag varriety you can then titivate and cover with heat shrink or a flashy jacket over the whole cable ....but as this is a basic cable we will leave it sans jacket. A note on solder always use good solder! if you usesilver solder remember that it can be very hard to rework....so if you get it wrong and its easy to do it can be a bugger! Check the cable for continuety using a multimeter and also that there are no shorts to ground. Then fit and listen....... A basic copper ic should out perform most commercial ones upto about £50.....a silver one can do the same to some of the more exotics and expensive commercial offerings. They of course will not be the very best sounding cables in the world, but they will sound damn good for the outlay, and of course you will have built them yourself.
