Speaker Cable Analysis ???

[dice45]

Originally posted by R. McAnally

Actually, Rod never says that cables are in no way audible. He states that the differences cannot be *seen* to a certain degree using measurements. While resistance and reactance of RCA and line cables can vary to a degree the difference is in RF range if you want to see any difference in electrical measurements. He also mentions speaker cables can indeed affect sonics by increasing output impedance "seen" by the speaker to the amplifier. [/B]

Randy,

I was not intending to challenge any of Rod's actual technical facts, sorry if I expressed myself misunderstandable. I was adressing the general tone of the text and the conclusions in it.

I admit, I did not read it from 1st to last word, I crosschecked some issues important to me and my disagreement comes from own experience wit the matter. I like to have things working fine and i like to learn how this can be achieved. I had too much talk about why things cannot work in my life already.

[Thatch_Ear]

I made my own out of old WE celonese covered 24awg copper telephone wire. Recently went to a DIY tube oriented group meeting and took the cables. Something that happened was that some flat cable(Goertz?) was hooked up and slowly everyone drifted from the room. I changed to my DIY using everything else including the music the and slowly the room filled back up. Go figure! 12 strands braided tightly in 5' lengths. I don't know but I've been told that twisting reduces band width. This I do know, use only one metal. Silver coated copper does not work well, or at least not for me. Different conductivities don't seem to mix. Also I believe that cables that sound great with SS can sound lousy with tubes and vice versa. I believe that braiding is good if you are using single strands and shielding is money out the window. By the way guys, I got my first isolation transformer set up for my analog today and that was an instant improvement. A few more days and I will have one for the Dig as well. I hope it does as much for the sound as the first one. New power cords and plugs are in the works and I will let you know how that goes. Later!

[soongsc]

This seems a suitable thread to call back so here goes.

Recently working with a full range speaker, I have been overwhelmed by how much 45cm of internal wiring effected the sound, and decided to find out what can be done to determine some trend. I used SoundEasy V13 and hooked the test setup like I would normally hook up for impedance testing except that the reference channel is not connected to avoid improper readings per distortion testing with SE. A power amplifiers is used to ensure equivalence to real world conditions. Using the Analog THD,IMD tool, I ran a single sweep to look at the harmonics contents and the THD using the speaker system changing the internal cable for each test.

As a result, the more correct sounding internal cable always had obviously lower harmonic contents, and there was lower THD in the low frequency range as well. I have not spend time to do this on external speaker cables, but I suspect the results would be similar in trend. I think anyone with distortion testing capabilities can run this kind of test.

I'm sure others will appreciate it if anyone else conducts this kind of test to see if trends are similar.