speaker cables for a Threshold 400a
 

Hi
I've just bought a used Threshold 400A in good condition. I understand that Wide bandwith Amps may have problems with some speaker cables.
My speakers are 6ohm and 88db.
Should I avoid biwring with this amp? Are there any brands that I should look at?
Thanks!

Hi there,

I have not heard of that the 400a having problems driving
capacitive loads such as electrostatics and other reactive loads and the only type of cable that I can think of that could be a problem are the ones having too much capacitance. To help the amp if you promptly must use such a cable, put a series inductor approx. 20µH parallelled with 1 to 10ohms since the 400a does not have such inductor built in. It ought to have though, because it sounds much better with one regardless if you have great reactive loads connected to it or not (my oppinion). The inductor would be of course a selfniductance air coil with approx. 20turns 1mm insulated copperthread on a diameter 8-10mm. Try it and you´ll find out for yourself.

Best regards
Bo

When the 400A came out, there were a couple of cables on the
market that created instability, which were the Polk and Mogami
cable, both low inductance and high capacitance.

Very few such cables are out there, and for those I recommend
an RC network (about .1uF in series with 5 ohms or so) at the
speaker end of the cable across the load.

Check out the article on speaker cables at www.passdiy.com
for some curves and square waves on this.

:cool: