I wrote the following as a guide for internal use at my work-place a few years back:
One "don't" that I hold close is this: Don't be mislead by the many "snake oil and, smoke and mirrors" cable vendors that seem to imbue speaker cables with magical (and astronomically expensive) properties. No matter what Monster Cable, Audioquest, or Cardas claim (or any other esoteric speaker wire manufacturer for that matter), there has never been any proof in any unbiased listen test that there is any benefit from using these "snake oil, and smoke and mirrors" inventions. [I still stand absolutely by this statement... if you are one of the sad souls that believe they can hear a difference, then you deserve to waste ALL your money on magical items - I have some acoustic candles for sale > they cost $1000 each and you must use one per speaker in your listening room.... the benefits are "when lit, you can find each speaker when you turn the lights off"....). The most amusing claim is that some speaker wires are directional... yes, some manufacturers have decided that their cables must be installed in a particular orientation (usually indicated by an arrow printed on the outer jacket of the cable indicating the direction from the amp to the speaker that the wire is "designed" to be used. All sorts of claims are made trying to justify this. However speakers are inherently AC (Alternating Current) devices, and hence the electrons in a speaker wire spend just as much time traveling in one direction, as they do the other, so there is no fathomable reasoning that explains just how a speaker cable can possibly be directional, well excepting possibly being able to charge 10 times more to cover the cost of printing the arrows... In fact if you consider this claim further, the more you realize the "wacko" aspect to this - if the cable truly did work better in one direction versus the other, then the resultant sound cannot possibly be anyt hing other than distorted when the electrons are flowing in the reverse direction! Another odd claim heard for some of the astoundingly expensive speaker connects on the market* is that 'normal' speaker cables exhibit some resonance in the audio band, due to their claimed transmission line properties (since it is common to model a cable as an RLC network). While the RLC model is not invalid, the (usually unsubstantiated) claim that the resonance occurs in the audio band (most often mentioned is 1.5kHz), is very easily proven through basic electronic math to be hopelessly incorrect, and even for a long 50 foot 10AWG cable of quite humble specification, the resonant frequency calculates out to be 2.02MHz (some 2 magnitudes beyond human hearing)! In reality cables DO NOT resonate at all! The model represented here is single RLC lumped circuit for simplicity and is only accurate at audio frequencies for circuit analysis. A speaker cable is actually a distributed element and should be represented as infinite number of lumped RLC models. As an infinite number o f lumped RLC circuits are modeled becoming its true distributed form factor, we see the resonance frequency go to infinity. In order to shorten this discussion the most basic don't is, don't buy any cable that claims anything other than the simple design goal of connecting an amplifier to a speaker. So what does matter? The bottom line is that the speaker cable DC resistance should by rule -of-thumb present no more than 5% of the impedance load presented by the speaker, and hence the ONLY real issue of concern is the resistance of the selected wire per foot. The speakers I use most often have a rated impedance of 4 Ohms, hence we do not want to see a DC resistance greater than 0.2 Ohms for the cable run. In general the distance run per wire gauge recommendations I use are as follows: Up to 40 feet : 14AWG 40-60 feet: 12 AWG 60-100 feet: 10 AWG - Neil On Jul 27, 2011, at 8:03 AM, umashankar mantravadi wrote: > > years ago (no decades ago) i found what a huge difference it made if the > wires were reasonably thick, and cut to be exactly same length. cutting them > to same length is problematic with eight loudspeakers (unless the amp sits in > the sweet spot) but my next rig, in my own house, in bangalore next year, > will have same length wires to all the speakers. umashankar > > i have published my poems. read (or buy) at http://stores.lulu.com/umashankar >> Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:57:49 -0700 >> From: [email protected] >> To: [email protected] >> Subject: Re: [Sursound] Distance perception >> >> On 26/07/11 3:41 p.m., Sampo Syreeni wrote: >>> On 2011-07-26, Fons Adriaensen wrote: >>>> I certainly don't want you to waste your money on fancy speaker cables. >>> Never thought otherwise. That's obviously never been what we do here. ;) >>>> But resistance does matter, so a good cross section such as 2.5 mm^2 puts >>>> you on the >>>> safe side. >>> >>> What I was trying to ask is, what's the real problem with resistance, >>> especially with >>> regard to a passive speaker and a modern, A/B class solid state end stage? >>> I mean, I >>> don't really see cable resistance shifting their operating point much, even >>> with >>> feedback, within the audible range. >>> >>> What is it that I'm missing? >> I swapped out some lamp cable on the speakers of a stereo setup some years >> back with >> some cheap stranded speaker cable I bought at Costco. Each core of the cable >> was about 3 >> times the cross sectional area of the lamp cord (each core of the speaker >> cable was >> about 3/16" in dia). The distances were not great, 5 or 6 feet. >> The improvement in stereo imaging was huge. >> Previously the image had wandered around between the speakers seemingly at >> random, now >> it was rock solid at the point wherever it was when I recorded it. >> _______________________________________________ >> Sursound mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound > > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: > <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20110727/2a25f5c3/attachment.html> > _______________________________________________ > Sursound mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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