Interconnect questions

[aptquark]

Spelling Police.



Pique my interest.

ALRIGHT LAURA....(my wife the English grad)...

..you better work on getting them crazy Canucks to calm down!

 

[DF96]

It depends on how or how well a cable is driven...

Yes. Feed it from a low impedance source and it doesn't matter. Feed it from a high impedance source (like some 'audiophile' preamps or 'passive' preamps) and you need either a short run or a low capacitance cable.

Also the level of signal going through it and current.

Unlikely. Typical interconnect signal levels are nowhere near any possible nonlinearity problems with any reasonable cable design. I suppose if your 'line level' is particularly low in voltage, and you like your music particularly loud, then some cable microphony might be possible - especially if fed from a high impedance source (see above).

and that starts the question put the power amp by the speaker and drive an interconnect

This depends on the balance of 'speaker cable resistance vs. speaker varying impedance' and 'interconnect capacitance value and non-linearity vs. source impedance'. My hunch is that in many cases short interconnects and long speaker cables is the better compromise, although this is the opposite of the usual view.

 

[M Gregg]

Unlikely. Typical interconnect signal levels are nowhere near any possible nonlinearity problems with any reasonable cable design. I suppose if your 'line level' is particularly low in voltage, and you like your music particularly loud, then some cable microphony might be possible - especially if fed from a high impedance source (see above).

Thinking about RFI and pick up linked to construction..

Regards
M. Gregg

 

[Johnny2Bad]

I know they do, some even produce their own... my point is that these cables do the job. Has anybody produced electrical signal test results between cables? I read lots of sales blurb from the companies selling expensive cables, but no hard proof.

I've seen test results for cables published. There were a few articles in I believe Speaker Builder Magazine, maybe Glass Audio. There were measured differences. I think some of the British HiFi press have done them as well. There have also been papers presented to AES conventions, and in the academic journals. Robert Fulton, Professor Malcolm Hawksford, others. Also 'The Supercables Cookbook" by the late Allen Wright, while not specifically a test report, delves into the math and offers practical DIY examples. Some of Wright's designs are the basis for commercial cables.

 

[SY]

Look up Dick Greiner's articles in JAES and his popular article in Audio. He did both models and experiments to show frequency response effects- and how to avoid them.

 

[DF96]

It is relatively easy to measure a cable and get some impressive-looking graphs, usually with some vital data missing (such as implausible feed impedance?). Except in pathological cases, somewhat harder to measure a real audio effect. Domestic audio cables are simply too short to do much harm to an audio signal, unless badly made or badly driven.