Wiring

The wires that connect to the Corona's drivers to the crossover were hardwired to the N800E crossover, which meant I also needed to replace the internal wiring from the drivers to the new Duelund CAST crossovers. 

For my original N800E crossovers, it looks like Altec used solid-core tinned-copper wire. Tinned-copper made for a durable and reliable wire that was the default choice for a lot of industrial applications during that period, where long-term stability and durability of the wire was an important consideration. Even almost 70 years later, the wiring loom of my N800E crossovers looks like new, proving that point. 

You might remember that way back when, friend Yazaki-san recommended vintage Western Electric 16GA tinned-copper wire for speaker cables to me, along with tinned-copper Belden 8402 microphone cables for use as interconnects.

Vintage Western Electric tinned-copper wire from Yazaki-san.

My reporting on the vintage Western Electric tinned-copper wiring created a buying frenzy for it, with prices quickly escalating, and stocks quickly selling out.

Fortunately, Frederik was able to develop a product line of tinned-copper wires according to Steen Duelund’s standards, and made them available to audio enthusiasts at an extremely affordable price. Thank you, Frederik! 

I thought the Duelund tinned-copper wire was subtly better sounding than the original Western Electric wire.

The Duelund DCA16GA tinned copper wire allowed more nuance to emerge from the music signal across the audio spectrum, which I think was probably due to Frederik’s use of an oil-soaked and baked cotton insulation, rather than the multi-layer thin plastic film and fabric insulation used by Western Electric, which subtly muted signal nuances. 

I imagine plastic in wires' insulation has the same sort of masking effect that Steen Duelund observed for plastic in capacitors.  

My intuitive choice was to use the Duelund DCA16GA tinned-copper wire in the crossovers, internally for wiring the high-frequency 802D compressions drivers and the 803A low-frequency drivers to the crossovers, and for speaker cables. 

The vintage Altec drivers binding posts only allow for a maximum of about 16 gauge wires, so that made the internal wiring choice easy. I’ve found Duelund DCA16GA tinned-copper wire to be a great match for all my vintage Altec loudspeakers.

It turns out that I didn’t have enough DCA16GA tinned-copper wire left in my wire stash to do all that wiring with DCA16GA, as I found I had used up most of the DCA16GA I had on hand for building speaker cables for my other pairs of loudspeakers.   

I did have enough of the DCA16GA tinned-copper wire left, with its oil-soaked and baked cotton insulator, to rewire the Coronas internally from the high-frequency 802D compression drivers to the crossovers.

Duelund 600V DCA16GA tinned-copper wire. 

I still had quite a lot of the Duelund 600V DCA16GA left in my wire stash. The CAST-like coating is what gives the 600V DCA16GA its 600V rating. 

From a sound quality perspective, the 600V DCA16GA sounds a little “softer” than the DCA16GA with the baked oil-soaked cotton dielectric, and more like vintage Western Electric in that regard. 

I rewired the 803A low-frequency drivers to the crossovers with the 600V DCA16GA, and I also used it for speaker cables. 

I skipped installing new binding posts in the loudspeakers, and instead wired the speaker cables directly to the crossovers, and wired directly from the crossovers to the drivers, for more signal nuance-preserving connections without solder joints. 

For the wiring in the crossovers themselves, I used the Duelund 600V DCA16GA for all the negative legs of the circuits. I used leftover scraps of Western Electric WE16GA tinned-copper wire I had for the positive legs, as their red color helped me keep straight the positive and negative wiring in the circuit as I worked, and also added a touch of vintage flair. 

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