Should Intercnnects & Speaker Cable be Shielded?

[ralph-bway]

I'm making the Jon Risch speaker cables with Belden Coax
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/spkrcbl1.htm

I'm also making the Chris VenHaus silver interconnects
http://www.venhaus1.com/diysilverinterconnects.html

What I was thinking of was encasing the individual cables and interconnects in some 1/4" I.D. tinned copper braiding I picked up on ebay, and clamping one or two ferrite magnets around the braid. Would this help protect the cables and interconnects against RF interference or would the braiding degrade the signal passing through the speaker cable and interconnects?

I tried searching but couldn't find anything specific to this. Thanks in advance for any information or pointing me in the right direction.

[Pbassred]

Shielding is completely unnesessary. In no way is RF powerfull enough to interfere with amplifier output to speakers.
There is maybe 10mV of interferance at 10Kohm impeadance. = 1X10exp-6Watts. Your amplifier punches out between 10 - 70V through only 8 ohm .

So, to give to an idea of scale, we are talking about whether you could hear a toilet flush, behind a closed door at the back of a heavy metal concert, while you stick your head in the bass bin.

Worry not

[AudioFreak]

Shielded interconnects can be beneficial but the speaker cable should be unshielded for best performance.

[DRC]

The loadspeaker is not effected by RF signals at sensible field strengths (your health would be in trouble first). On the other hand the power amp feedback loop may be effected by even small levels of RF entering through the speaker cable (arial). A well designed amp should not suffer much though ... If you did use shielding you should be careful the extra capasitance does not screw-up the amp.

I have seen the effects of EMI first hand while observing tests (many years ago), many items of domestic and lab equipment would malfunction, blow fuses or even start smoking when exposed to even low level RF (this was 10Mhz - 2 GHz). At full test strenth (10V/M) pretty much anything electronic would stop working (except for the mega-safety-critical kit we were actually supposed to be testing ).

Dave / wouldn't bother on speaker cable.

[Dan Banquer]

I'd say it depends on the environment that your equipment is in. I have been residing less than 50 yards from a rather large and reasonably powerful Ham radio antenna. I use shielded speaker cables (Belden #8720). The shield is tied at one end to amp case which is earth ground. I should note however that speaker cables are generally the last thing to apply shielding to.