Yes, that's been mentioned a few times already. It won't bother any well-engineered amplifier.
Hi markusA.,
1- Yes, but, IMHO it depends much of the stage witch run the cable than the cable itself.
2- The main factors for signal cables will be shield's currents and impedance.
With big currents (loudspeakers), it will be the resistance.
2b-For low currents, quality and size of the Insulating material between the wires, for hight current: Size matters (size of the conductor)
3- When some of the characteristics of the charge (impedance and capacity reach a limit of the source (stability) or when the impedance is more than very few the one of the target (loudspeker). Remember a loudspeaker is very low impedance, and , most of the time, this impedance is not linear with frequency. If your cable add (it always add) a serial resistance, it will affect the original response curve, reducing the sound level where the Loudspeaker's impedance is lower.
4- No. Agree.
5- Low and constant impedance, low parasitic capacity,
Let me take an example. Whe have two different cd drives, and a poor preamp with a slow input stage. lets plug a very capacitive cable between them.
A- Tha first Cd drive is a very fast oversampled DAC with bad filtered high frequencies, followed by a hight impedance output stage.The cable capacitance will reduce the overshots and ripple you can see from the square hight frequency signal: Thus, the following input stage will not recieve hight spped signals he can't deal with, and produce less distortion. this high capacity will reduce listening distortions, and the sound will be warmer and less aggressive on high signals.
B- The second CD drive produce a nice signal but his output stage is hight impedance, and has a high feddback loop (very sensible to capacitive loads). This same cable will phush-it near his stability limit, adding an overshoot and ripple ti the square signal. The sound will be more aggressive, and you will loose warm.
Same cable, two opposite modification to the sound. Notice that, with a better output stage: Clean signal, very low output impedance, hight current capabilities, high capacitive loads immunity, you will not hear differences between two cables. And our previous one will be "transparent".
(Apologize for my poor English)
Some rules with cables always runs. Large is diameter of the wires for running a loudspeaker, better ti is. Single conductor (when you can) is better. If you cannot, prefer thinest and great number of conductors (i can explain that). More space or distances between the two (or three) conductors, better it is.
Take care of the cabling. For signal in non symmetric environment, never use the shied to connect the ground. The shied is better connected to the output, free on the input side, and we will use an other conductor to connect the ground together.
On my side, i use CATnetwok cables for connecting equipement together. Four loud speakers, a shielded mono conductor cable.(shield connected to the ground of the amplifier).
Oh, and i forgot: take care of the sens your equipment's electric plugs are plugged in order to get the minimal current flow and EMI between grounds. And avoid ground loops.
1- Yes, but, IMHO it depends much of the stage witch run the cable than the cable itself.
2- The main factors for signal cables will be shield's currents and impedance.
With big currents (loudspeakers), it will be the resistance.
2b-For low currents, quality and size of the Insulating material between the wires, for hight current: Size matters (size of the conductor)
3- When some of the characteristics of the charge (impedance and capacity reach a limit of the source (stability) or when the impedance is more than very few the one of the target (loudspeker). Remember a loudspeaker is very low impedance, and , most of the time, this impedance is not linear with frequency. If your cable add (it always add) a serial resistance, it will affect the original response curve, reducing the sound level where the Loudspeaker's impedance is lower.
4- No. Agree.
5- Low and constant impedance, low parasitic capacity,
Let me take an example. Whe have two different cd drives, and a poor preamp with a slow input stage. lets plug a very capacitive cable between them.
A- Tha first Cd drive is a very fast oversampled DAC with bad filtered high frequencies, followed by a hight impedance output stage.The cable capacitance will reduce the overshots and ripple you can see from the square hight frequency signal: Thus, the following input stage will not recieve hight spped signals he can't deal with, and produce less distortion. this high capacity will reduce listening distortions, and the sound will be warmer and less aggressive on high signals.
B- The second CD drive produce a nice signal but his output stage is hight impedance, and has a high feddback loop (very sensible to capacitive loads). This same cable will phush-it near his stability limit, adding an overshoot and ripple ti the square signal. The sound will be more aggressive, and you will loose warm.
Same cable, two opposite modification to the sound. Notice that, with a better output stage: Clean signal, very low output impedance, hight current capabilities, high capacitive loads immunity, you will not hear differences between two cables. And our previous one will be "transparent".
(Apologize for my poor English)
Some rules with cables always runs. Large is diameter of the wires for running a loudspeaker, better ti is. Single conductor (when you can) is better. If you cannot, prefer thinest and great number of conductors (i can explain that). More space or distances between the two (or three) conductors, better it is.
Take care of the cabling. For signal in non symmetric environment, never use the shied to connect the ground. The shied is better connected to the output, free on the input side, and we will use an other conductor to connect the ground together.
On my side, i use CATnetwok cables for connecting equipement together. Four loud speakers, a shielded mono conductor cable.(shield connected to the ground of the amplifier).
Oh, and i forgot: take care of the sens your equipment's electric plugs are plugged in order to get the minimal current flow and EMI between grounds. And avoid ground loops.
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Color of the cables matters. A green cable will bring a natural sound. A red one will be hot, a blue one brings precision but a yellow will be more dynamic.
This joke to mention that concentrating on minor details during endless listening comparisons can bring-you to auto suggestions artifacts, specialy if you are under influence of a some good "high end" "state of the art" audio equipments vendor. The way we listen is a complex mix of memory, social culture, personal experiences, dreams and desires etc...
One can have a satisfaction in spending 10 000$ in a liquid Galium cable witch makes a sooo fluid sound. An other will take more pleasure in comparing cable's sounds than in listening to music.
Some others prefer to concentrate on girls sexual differences...
On my side, i'm a poor man, and i love listening music... with girls.(Still looking for a perfect one, prefering hot ones than neutral.)
This joke to mention that concentrating on minor details during endless listening comparisons can bring-you to auto suggestions artifacts, specialy if you are under influence of a some good "high end" "state of the art" audio equipments vendor. The way we listen is a complex mix of memory, social culture, personal experiences, dreams and desires etc...
One can have a satisfaction in spending 10 000$ in a liquid Galium cable witch makes a sooo fluid sound. An other will take more pleasure in comparing cable's sounds than in listening to music.
Some others prefer to concentrate on girls sexual differences...
On my side, i'm a poor man, and i love listening music... with girls.(Still looking for a perfect one, prefering hot ones than neutral.)
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We argue that the capacitance of the cable must be high, which inevitably results in a low inductance, as L and C are inextricably linked. (It is impossible to have low inductance and low capacitance at the same time and vice-versa). The C must be chosen to give square-root of L /C = about 8 ohms. Where L is the inductance in Henries per unit length and C is in Farads per unit length. If this cable (as in Isolda) is terminated with an 8 ohm resistor, then the cable will appear to be purely resistive at frequencies above about 1 kHz. The resistance of the cable affects the impedance of the cable at lower frequencies, rising to about 60 ohms at 10 Hz for a cable with 5.6 milli-ohms per metre (again Isolda). For a real speaker with impedance varying from say 4 ohms to 12 ohms below 1 kHz, the deviation from 8 ohms is minimal. Above 1 kHz, if the load impedance is set at (about) 8 ohms (connect a Zobel of 10 ohms in series with 0.022uF across speaker terminals), then the cable will look like 8 ohms in the critical region between 1kHz and 80kHz.
Also, the resistance of the speaker voice coil is typically 6 ohms in series with a cable with typically 0.003 ohms for a three metre (10') run. If the resistance of the cable is doubled, then the percentage change of total resistance would be 0.05%. We don't consider this to be significant. Nor will the frequency response change much with the impedance change of the speaker from 8 to 16 ohms (2.16 x 10 to -5 dB).
Further, all two "wire" conductor situations may be treated as transmission lines, including, for example, a single piece of wet string suspended above moist ground, so depending upon length and frequency, the transmission line may be long (finite wavelengths in the line) or short (fractions of a wavelength in the line). Most people are familiar with long transmission lines (Ham radio at 27MHz for example) but few are familiar with short transmission lines as in the case of a speaker cables. With a short transmission line and simplex operation (transmission in one direction) where the cable is miss-terminated at both ends, the signal sent from one end will propagate down the line at about 0.6 the speed-of-light to the load, where a small proportion of the signal, typically 0.5%, will be absorbed in the load. The remaining 99.5% will reflect back to the source where a little more will be absorbed, the remainder reflecting back to the load. This repeats with the signal reflecting back and forth between the load and the source for about 200 times when eventually it diminishes into the noise. In the case of a speaker cable, this ramifies itself sonically as an “edgy” “blurring” effect which is unmistakable when an impedance matched cable is compared with an unmatched one.
We first discovered the effect of impedance matching when a Japanese sourced Monitor Audio cable was introduced into the UK in about 1978. Its sound was profound! Unfortunately, it blew up the Naim 250 amplifier which required about 4uH of inductance as supplied by 3 metres of 450 ohm impedance Naim cable to be stable. Unfortunately the dominance of Naim on the UK and world market forced the Monitor audio cable into oblivion.
We now manufacture our impedance Isolda cable with two 2uH inductors, one in each conductor, at the amplifier end, so that unstable amplifiers (including Naim) will not blow up when the speaker is disconnected from the cable. The two (inaudible) inductors (lumped, not distributed) also function as a most effective RF filter which blocks off RF interference from entering the amplifier from the speaker cable.
To demonstrate all this further, we are preparing more experiments, which we will present on U-Tube and on our website, showing the 200 odd reflections for a miss terminated cable and the sound of the difference signal present across the two ends of a speaker cable when music is playing. In the case of the identical conductors widely spaced, the sound is clearly distorted and with correct, closely spaced geometry, the sound is smooth and clear.
The reason we use impedance matched speaker cable is that it just sounds better ALWAYS! Deep Cryogenically Treating (DCT) improves the sound even more, but we don't know why. . .yet! Good insulation is also vital, PTFE best, polyester second.
Also, the resistance of the speaker voice coil is typically 6 ohms in series with a cable with typically 0.003 ohms for a three metre (10') run. If the resistance of the cable is doubled, then the percentage change of total resistance would be 0.05%. We don't consider this to be significant. Nor will the frequency response change much with the impedance change of the speaker from 8 to 16 ohms (2.16 x 10 to -5 dB).
Further, all two "wire" conductor situations may be treated as transmission lines, including, for example, a single piece of wet string suspended above moist ground, so depending upon length and frequency, the transmission line may be long (finite wavelengths in the line) or short (fractions of a wavelength in the line). Most people are familiar with long transmission lines (Ham radio at 27MHz for example) but few are familiar with short transmission lines as in the case of a speaker cables. With a short transmission line and simplex operation (transmission in one direction) where the cable is miss-terminated at both ends, the signal sent from one end will propagate down the line at about 0.6 the speed-of-light to the load, where a small proportion of the signal, typically 0.5%, will be absorbed in the load. The remaining 99.5% will reflect back to the source where a little more will be absorbed, the remainder reflecting back to the load. This repeats with the signal reflecting back and forth between the load and the source for about 200 times when eventually it diminishes into the noise. In the case of a speaker cable, this ramifies itself sonically as an “edgy” “blurring” effect which is unmistakable when an impedance matched cable is compared with an unmatched one.
We first discovered the effect of impedance matching when a Japanese sourced Monitor Audio cable was introduced into the UK in about 1978. Its sound was profound! Unfortunately, it blew up the Naim 250 amplifier which required about 4uH of inductance as supplied by 3 metres of 450 ohm impedance Naim cable to be stable. Unfortunately the dominance of Naim on the UK and world market forced the Monitor audio cable into oblivion.
We now manufacture our impedance Isolda cable with two 2uH inductors, one in each conductor, at the amplifier end, so that unstable amplifiers (including Naim) will not blow up when the speaker is disconnected from the cable. The two (inaudible) inductors (lumped, not distributed) also function as a most effective RF filter which blocks off RF interference from entering the amplifier from the speaker cable.
To demonstrate all this further, we are preparing more experiments, which we will present on U-Tube and on our website, showing the 200 odd reflections for a miss terminated cable and the sound of the difference signal present across the two ends of a speaker cable when music is playing. In the case of the identical conductors widely spaced, the sound is clearly distorted and with correct, closely spaced geometry, the sound is smooth and clear.
The reason we use impedance matched speaker cable is that it just sounds better ALWAYS! Deep Cryogenically Treating (DCT) improves the sound even more, but we don't know why. . .yet! Good insulation is also vital, PTFE best, polyester second.
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Have you tried green girls with red hair? Both hot and natural at the same time, and the best ones can photosynthesize for lower maintenance costs.
Sorry, not new laws. They were old when I learned them in the 60s.
BTW. Length of cable does (up to a point) not matter when the cables are impedance matched, that's why we offer cables in un-equal lengths e.g. 10m on side, 2m the other. All cable suppliers who insist on equal lengths are admitting that their cables change the sound the longer they get.
BTW. Length of cable does (up to a point) not matter when the cables are impedance matched, that's why we offer cables in un-equal lengths e.g. 10m on side, 2m the other. All cable suppliers who insist on equal lengths are admitting that their cables change the sound the longer they get.
Hi,
It is applicable to a few inch of stripline on a PCB. What makes you think it does not apply to several meters of cable?
Do you have some new physics that illustrate the common laws, such as modelled by the telegraphers equations, suddenly stop to apply because we are no longer having striplines on a PCB or 50cm Coax cable, but instead 3m of speaker cable?
Ciao T
It is applicable to a few inch of stripline on a PCB. What makes you think it does not apply to several meters of cable?
Do you have some new physics that illustrate the common laws, such as modelled by the telegraphers equations, suddenly stop to apply because we are no longer having striplines on a PCB or 50cm Coax cable, but instead 3m of speaker cable?
Ciao T
Hi, MaxTownshend , can you explain what did you mean by "matched" when an amplifier has a damping factor of, let say, 500, not frequency linear ?
What is the level of transmission distortions of a cable, regarding impedance curve of a cable, when you compare at the one of a loudspeaker ?
About so colling reflexions in the audio band (let's says 0-50kz) can-you show us some images of them, on an oscilloscope screen ?
You cannot mix phenomenas that appears at kilometric waves with picometrics ones. Seems obvious.
What is the level of transmission distortions of a cable, regarding impedance curve of a cable, when you compare at the one of a loudspeaker ?
About so colling reflexions in the audio band (let's says 0-50kz) can-you show us some images of them, on an oscilloscope screen ?
You cannot mix phenomenas that appears at kilometric waves with picometrics ones. Seems obvious.
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Use a Smith chart scaled to 8 Ohms. You couldn't make one big enough to see any of this. Same holds for .0005 wavelengths on a PC board.
re post 336. Yes, I am (Townshend Audio) the manufacturer of the Isolda cables, but I was asked to join this forum because I have something to say about cables. Just because I manufacture the cable does not make me suspect. I chose this way after years of research and have decided that it is the best way to go and use it in my system. I am a qualified electronics engineer with an honors degree in low frequency transmission line theory, so the theory here is not a surprise. Further, I am not trying to sell cable, but to justify my engineering decisions.
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