More fun with cables

[Bob Brines]

You all know how I like to stir the pot. Here I go.

You also probably know that I don’t think much of the reported differences between speaker cables. Now I don’t have any of the exotic high priced stuff to play with, but I thought I’d do a comparison of what I have on hand. I have four cables on hand:

• 16ga Zip Cord. Bought this stuff at Wal-Mart in the automotive section.
• 4pr CAT5. Solids to +ve, stripes to –ve.
• 2pr CAT5 – star wound.
• “White Lightning”. 16ga 3-wire extension cord. The green wire is attached to the –ve lead at the amp end only, floating at the speaker end.

I ran an RTA with each of the cables. The amp and speaker are actually irrelevant as long as some output is available over the frequency range. A case could be make that this is not true if the cable under test has some wild set of LCR parameters, but these four cables don’t. But I know you want to know, so I used a SI super T-amp and my LT-2000 MLTL loaded with a TB W8-1772.

I subtracted the frequency response of each of the cables from the response of the 16ga zip cord, my standard. The results are shown on the graph below. Because the vertical scale is so small, +/- 1dB, the traces were so noisy that I had to do 1/3 octave smoothing to see the signal.

Well, as you can see, there is very little difference between these four cables. The star-wound cable with an equivalent guage of ~21 is 0.15dB weaker overall and almost 0.4 dB weaker at 20Hz. The other two cables are within 0.05dB on average with no excursion beyond 0.1dB, except that the CAT5 cable is 0.7dB stronger at 20Hz.

Does this prove anything? Probably not, except is demonstrates why I can’t hear any difference between them.

Bob

[jpbturbo]

My ears can hear a difference between zip cord/monster cable and some simple cat5 cables I made.

congrats on doing the research though.

-josh

[FredT]

There's another problem with expensive cables that you'll never read about in any of the audio magazines. In certain situations, smart cables, those that have a built in brain, can become unruly and do all sorts of damage. Here's a picture of the one I had a problem with. And while I was trying to avoid one end I left myself completely exposed at the other.

http://lonestarbottleheads.org/galle...lbum=18&pos=30