Any use for old phone cords (RJ11)

I have a bag full of old phone cable with RJ11 connectors. Any use for the cable? Will they make awesome RCA interconnects or anything? Any other possible uses for these old cables, or toss them?

 

Braid it into a cat-o-nine tails and get your freak on. No kink shaming here.


(this is cat5, but close enough)

 

At least try to recycle them at your local center.

 

What, the plaited, cotton covered stuff?

Oh. Disappointing. I think they were probably only barely adequate as phone cables! And I guess I was thinking of my grandparents' phones.

The main use in my house is tangling around all the other cables in my wire drawer. Somehow, they seem really good at that!

I also vote: Recycle!

 

Ex-wife?????

 

You can custom wire sockets and use them as (crappy) ethernet cables... (says a hacker from way back...)

 

Hip new shoelaces?

 

Copper is copper. I see no reason not to try something with them. Double-up wire pairs and maybe use them for speakers. I can't comment on using them as RCA - you'd have to figure out the grounding scheme for that.

 

With this in mind, you could always strip out the copper and sell it to a metal scrapper. I know a retiree who used to do this as a side hustle and made some decent extra coin from people's electronic and metal trash.

 

Wire in those cables is 28AWG. A thousand feet of 28-gauge is half a pound of copper. Scrap value of copper is like $2/pound.

Phone cords have either 2 or 4 conductors. So if you stripped all the wire out of a mile of cable, you could make ten or twenty dollars. I say go for it.

 

You could buy bulk braided shielding by the foot, then cut the connectors off the phone cable, strip the wires, twist them together and use them for signal, then shielding to ground on rca plugs and wrap the whole thing in techflex/paracord/cotton sleeve for rca cables. Though at that point you'll probably have spent more than just buying good quality shielded bulk cable, unless you were going to sleeve it in something anyway, in which case maybe break even, but who knows for sq.

 

1. Just stick phono plugs on some, use them as phono cables, tell everyone how expensive they were and watch people confirm how much better your gear sounds.

2. Laugh.

3. Decide, hey, maybe it does sound better and keep it.

 

Actually....

I had some extra Dish Network RG59 6' cables. I just clipped them and soldered on Rean RCA plugs. I haven't tried them yet, but I imagine they work. Home made Blue Jeans cables!

 

Is there any particular reason for phono/RCA interconnects to be coax? I've got plenty of came-with-stuff cheapo ones that, I'm pretty sure, are not.

As I said before, RCA is a historical accident as a cable "standard." i wonder if coax interconnects are also an accident --- or, more likely, a marketing ploy because it looks/feels fancier.

I'm a dumbo on much of the theory, but don't they carry an AC current just like speakers do?

I'm talking about analogue cables, not digital.

 

Has anyone actually made a cable out of the bungee rj45 stuff? I can see the ORFAS getting excited with how they'd look.

 

I think the point of coaxial structure in RCA cables is mainly noise rejection and reduced signal loss, since at line levels, they're carrying much lower voltage signals than speaker levels.

 

Coax cable has a constant radius between between the inner and outer conductors, and thus in theory constant characteristic impedance. How that's applicable for an audio signal over short distances blah blah something something, nevermind that the termination for most RCA connectors are not done correctly to maintain that characteristic impedance anyways.

RCA connectors are super convenient though, and don't care about rotational orientation. You ever try to make a short XLR interconnect with really thick cabling and realize your rotational alignment is off and the cable won't twist? Argh.

 

Yes, but assuming analogue, it's two conductors making a circuit. Isn't that different from signal carried inside shield? Does it even matter which way around an analogue coax cable (Inner/outer) is wired?

I'm thinking its hogwash that we've all fallen for. To be honest, it is only today that I'm really even thinking about it!

I think you're spot on with the bla-blah-something. For analogue.

On the other hand, for digital, I've read that, at least theoretically, impedance matters...

...and that hifi digital cables are often not to spec, and even if they aren't, the terminations are almost always not.

Disclosure: I probably read this on Blue Jeans site. That is the level of my knowledge and research.

Well, no, I never have tried that. But I've messed around with enough wires to imagine the swearing!

 

Expand it and glue inside perspex tubing? That would sound look amazing!

 

Back to Square One

Sure. You use it to wrap together all the outdated phone/modem/wallwarts/etc that now neither used nor even usable