Hi Bricolo,
I alway try for the same length on left and right for a couple reasons. One is simply that my system could be laid out differently next month and would be mad if one of the cables were too short. The other is I want both speakers to present the same loading to the amp. It's not a big thing, but in our hobby, little things add up.
I alway try for the same length on left and right for a couple reasons. One is simply that my system could be laid out differently next month and would be mad if one of the cables were too short. The other is I want both speakers to present the same loading to the amp. It's not a big thing, but in our hobby, little things add up.
I'm not an engineer, I've never even been in a holiday inn express, but I have heard a few reasonable sounding things on this topic. I don't know what loading is presented to the amp by different lengths of cable but it may be a concern. I do know that the difference in speed between a signal through wire and the speed of sound on its path from the driver to your ears is sufficient that a few thousand feet of difference in length between the cables would be equivalent to moving one of your speakers half an inch backward or forward in the soundstage. Is it really worth fretting about a few feet of cable? Well, listening fufillment often requires, lets be honest, peace of mind whereever it can be demonstrated that something could make any difference at all. Building immobile concrete isolation pads for all of your equipment may arguably be beyond the pale, but cutting your speaker cables to exact lengths should probably be done just as a matter of course. Why not?
A real concern is having too much cable anywhere coiled up with zip tie. This, by any other name, becomes a choke. Speaker
cable shouldn't be doubled upon itself.
Another little bit of barstool trivia concerns the electrical conductivity of gold. So many connections are gold plated and the reason is little appreciated. Gold is actually not as effective a conductor as pure copper. It is superior for connections for two other reasons. It is less prone to tarnish and oxidization, so more reliable, but more significant is its malleability. It is soft enough to distort and conform to the surface it is pushed against so that the added surface area now mating the two parts more than compensates for the golds (relatively) poorer conductivity. If you are soldering leads that are gold plated, you should twist them very tightly together before soldering or you are actually negating the benfit that the gold plating offers. You'd be better off without it in the way. I wonder sometimes how often gold plating is offered simply as a gimmick. For the same reasons associated with its amazing malleability, you can plate a cable end in it with such an extremely thin layer that the cost is almost approaches nil. Cheap gold. Kind of counterintuitive eh?
A real concern is having too much cable anywhere coiled up with zip tie. This, by any other name, becomes a choke. Speaker
cable shouldn't be doubled upon itself.
Another little bit of barstool trivia concerns the electrical conductivity of gold. So many connections are gold plated and the reason is little appreciated. Gold is actually not as effective a conductor as pure copper. It is superior for connections for two other reasons. It is less prone to tarnish and oxidization, so more reliable, but more significant is its malleability. It is soft enough to distort and conform to the surface it is pushed against so that the added surface area now mating the two parts more than compensates for the golds (relatively) poorer conductivity. If you are soldering leads that are gold plated, you should twist them very tightly together before soldering or you are actually negating the benfit that the gold plating offers. You'd be better off without it in the way. I wonder sometimes how often gold plating is offered simply as a gimmick. For the same reasons associated with its amazing malleability, you can plate a cable end in it with such an extremely thin layer that the cost is almost approaches nil. Cheap gold. Kind of counterintuitive eh?
Hi Bradley,
I agree with most of what you've said, but WRT the "cable-is-cable and copper-is-cooper" view on speaker cables I would refer you to this article by Nelson Pass. He wrote it more than 20 years ago for Speaker Builder magazine.
I agree with most of what you've said, but WRT the "cable-is-cable and copper-is-cooper" view on speaker cables I would refer you to this article by Nelson Pass. He wrote it more than 20 years ago for Speaker Builder magazine.
When I worked in a Hi-Fi store we tried to answer the question.
We had access to different lengths of cable and could try combinations, short + short, long + long and short + long.
The short answer: (small pun) Our ears told us the system sounded the same with all 3 combinations noted above.
The un-scientific explaination we came up with: The distortion the cable imparts on the music comes from the 1st 1 or 2 feet. After you have gotten the cables sonic signature, length does not seem matter much.
Another conclusion we came to: If you are on a budget, you would be better off spending your money buying unequal lengths of superior cable than buying more cable of less expensive stuff.
Example A:
30 ft of Acme brand cable costs $30.00
You make 1 ea 20 ft run + 1 ea 10 foot run
or
Example B:
40 ft Huge brand cable costs $30.00
you make 2 ea 20 ft runs
Go with example A, if Acme sounds better in your system.
For what it is worth.
Aud_mot
We had access to different lengths of cable and could try combinations, short + short, long + long and short + long.
The short answer: (small pun) Our ears told us the system sounded the same with all 3 combinations noted above.
The un-scientific explaination we came up with: The distortion the cable imparts on the music comes from the 1st 1 or 2 feet. After you have gotten the cables sonic signature, length does not seem matter much.
Another conclusion we came to: If you are on a budget, you would be better off spending your money buying unequal lengths of superior cable than buying more cable of less expensive stuff.
Example A:
30 ft of Acme brand cable costs $30.00
You make 1 ea 20 ft run + 1 ea 10 foot run
or
Example B:
40 ft Huge brand cable costs $30.00
you make 2 ea 20 ft runs
Go with example A, if Acme sounds better in your system.
For what it is worth.
Aud_mot
I like Nelsons article but don’t have time right now to give it a good read. Food for my next bout of sleeplessness.
I think SY posted something in a different thread talking about when specialty speaker cables came into being in the late seventies and some of us stopped using 14 gauge lap cord. It was an interesting observation that at the time a lot of amplifiers would go into catastrophic oscillation when subjected to these new higher capacitance cables.
From my own ludite experience with said 14 gauge lamp cord, a difference of around 6 feet is where Ive started to hear the difference. Adjusting the pan (er, uhm thats balance) pot can adjust the relative level to re-center the image, sort of. My own experience is that the color of the sound just wont balance anymore.
Perhaps this has something to do with the audiophile grade lamp cord I use. I prefer 14 gauge "heater cord" when I can find it, but that never seems to happen when I need it.
(I just checked and my zip cord is 14 gauge, not 12 as previously psoted. Ive looked byt have never found comodity grade 12 guage lamp cord. For 10 and 12 guage cables SO and SJ jackets seem to be the norm)
I think SY posted something in a different thread talking about when specialty speaker cables came into being in the late seventies and some of us stopped using 14 gauge lap cord. It was an interesting observation that at the time a lot of amplifiers would go into catastrophic oscillation when subjected to these new higher capacitance cables.
From my own ludite experience with said 14 gauge lamp cord, a difference of around 6 feet is where Ive started to hear the difference. Adjusting the pan (er, uhm thats balance) pot can adjust the relative level to re-center the image, sort of. My own experience is that the color of the sound just wont balance anymore.
Perhaps this has something to do with the audiophile grade lamp cord I use. I prefer 14 gauge "heater cord" when I can find it, but that never seems to happen when I need it.
(I just checked and my zip cord is 14 gauge, not 12 as previously psoted. Ive looked byt have never found comodity grade 12 guage lamp cord. For 10 and 12 guage cables SO and SJ jackets seem to be the norm)
I keep the cables as short as pos (two meters atm), and they are equal in length. However I think it depends how long the cables are in the fisrt place. If you need a difference of two meters between speakers and the length of one cable is two meters, so the other is four. This means the resistance will be double and the other parameters will scale too. But if one cable is 10 meters and the other 12, thats less of a difference over all. If you add 0.2ohms onto a cable I doubt you would hear the difference, I dont know about the other parameters.
It's not so much the Idea of adding 0.2ohms to the total speakers/crossover impedence, which is typically only adding 3%. It's the idea that your effectively adding 0.2ohms to the output impedence of the amp. This can amount increasing the output impedence by anywhere from 10% to 400% or more on high NFB amps. This could have zero effect on the sound or it could have very profound effects on the sound depending on the amp and speakers. As David alluded to when the hi-end cable first hit the market, I believe the story I heard concerned the Polk co-ax cables and one of the GAS amps. The high capacitance of the cable sent the amp into distructive oscillation. This doesn't seem to be the case with todays amps and cables, but it clearly shows there is an interaction that should be considered.5th element said:
Wire connections
I also have unequal wire lengths, but that doesn't concern me as much as the connections. I have 5 way binding posts on my speakers and amp. The connections used to be bare wire, but I made my speaker wire out of CAT 5 cable and the strands did not hold together well when plugging and unplugging speakers a lot. So I soldered the ends on all the CAT 5 speaker cables. Can the speakers sound slightly worse because of the solder at the end of these cables cause I think they do? Should I go back to bare wire or get some spade lugs or bannana plugs?
I also have unequal wire lengths, but that doesn't concern me as much as the connections. I have 5 way binding posts on my speakers and amp. The connections used to be bare wire, but I made my speaker wire out of CAT 5 cable and the strands did not hold together well when plugging and unplugging speakers a lot. So I soldered the ends on all the CAT 5 speaker cables. Can the speakers sound slightly worse because of the solder at the end of these cables cause I think they do? Should I go back to bare wire or get some spade lugs or bannana plugs?
Re: Wire connections
This is where the hobby/obsession become a matter of what is going to make you happy. One possibility is to strip the Cat5 cables back about an inch. Then try to solder just the last 1/2" leaving about 1/2" between the solder end and the insulation unsoldered. Than you can pull the wire through the connector to the unsoldered portion and not have to worry about it coming apart and still have and unsoldered connection.Jimmy154 said:
Thanks roddyama, why didn't I think of that (strip wire and move the connection to bare wire).
So there's is no problem with soldering the wire before you put it in 5-way binding posts, for example? Cause I'm going to do it in the future also. The speakers don't really sound worse. My obsession lies more with doing things correctly and the possiblity that they may sound worse witout me noticing (pretting irrational I know, but I don't notice a lot of things I think).
So there's is no problem with soldering the wire before you put it in 5-way binding posts, for example? Cause I'm going to do it in the future also. The speakers don't really sound worse. My obsession lies more with doing things correctly and the possiblity that they may sound worse witout me noticing (pretting irrational I know, but I don't notice a lot of things I think).
Jimmy154 said:
If your cable is a thick bunch of small individual wires, don't solder it! If you do, you fix the cables ends, so whenever you move the cable a couple of those thin wires will break. After some time you can easily lose half the cross section that way.
On coiling the cable: assuming that the cable consist of twin leads, the effective inductance is so low that coiling doesn't make a significant difference, unless it is a couple of 1000 feet.
Jan Didden
Here are the ohms per 1,000 ft figures
20 gauge 10.15
18 gauge 6.39
16 gauge 4.02
14 gauge 2.53
12 gauge 1.59
10 gauge 1.0
If you do the math the range is
20 gauge = 0.0102 ohms per foot
10 gauge = 0.0010 ohms per foot
What I choose to look at here is the differences. The savings in 20 gauge Vs 10 gauge is only 0.0092 ohms per foot. Over a 10 foot run a difference of .092 ohms total. 16 gauge Vs 12 gauge equals a difference of .0243 ohms per 10 foot run.
Another difference is to look at DC resistance with the same cable but different lengths. The difference with 14 gauge 10 ft Vs 20 ft = .0253 ohms.
My opinion is that DC resistance is not a factor when you start using real world cable gauges and real world cable lengths. I do not know how many dB is dropped over a resistance of .0253 ohms when using a typical amplifier and typical speaker, but I will bet it is not much. I would also bet that most people do not balance the gain of their CD players, phono stages, pre-amps, and amps to that precision. Does their volume and balance control track that well over it's rotation?
Do cables sound different? I say yes.
When making a cable choice should gauge be a factor in your decision? I say no.
Is there any reason to believe that 10 gauge cable will sound better than a 16 gauge cable? I say no.
Aud_Mot
20 gauge 10.15
18 gauge 6.39
16 gauge 4.02
14 gauge 2.53
12 gauge 1.59
10 gauge 1.0
If you do the math the range is
20 gauge = 0.0102 ohms per foot
10 gauge = 0.0010 ohms per foot
What I choose to look at here is the differences. The savings in 20 gauge Vs 10 gauge is only 0.0092 ohms per foot. Over a 10 foot run a difference of .092 ohms total. 16 gauge Vs 12 gauge equals a difference of .0243 ohms per 10 foot run.
Another difference is to look at DC resistance with the same cable but different lengths. The difference with 14 gauge 10 ft Vs 20 ft = .0253 ohms.
My opinion is that DC resistance is not a factor when you start using real world cable gauges and real world cable lengths. I do not know how many dB is dropped over a resistance of .0253 ohms when using a typical amplifier and typical speaker, but I will bet it is not much. I would also bet that most people do not balance the gain of their CD players, phono stages, pre-amps, and amps to that precision. Does their volume and balance control track that well over it's rotation?
Do cables sound different? I say yes.
When making a cable choice should gauge be a factor in your decision? I say no.
Is there any reason to believe that 10 gauge cable will sound better than a 16 gauge cable? I say no.
Aud_Mot
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