Does making distortion measurement of cable make sense?

[Hans Polak]

Your typical speaker cable is 100 ohms. And about 5m long. A Child of Ten can calculate the lumped parameter values of such a cable.

Comes out at 1000pF and 0.02mH. Terminate such a cable in 8 ohms, a near short, and the worst that can happen is less than 0.02mH inductance. And voltage amps won't blink an eyelid at a bit of inductance. Is 0.02mH a lot? Not really. Most tweeters are about 0.05mH inductance. So slight rolloff at high frequencies is expected. Typically a dB or so. Interestingly most coils and voicecoils are 5-10m long.

With Zo=100R and C=1n, L has to be 0.010mH, even better 😀

Hans

 

[johnmath]

... Graham Cohen, he was one of the smart guys who contributed to what we have today.

Oops, misspelt his name, it was Graeme. I live off grid on an Island these days. The last AES Section meeting I went to was a respective on Graeme's audio innovations a year or two ago.

 

[Evenharmonics]

Sure. But what is the magic length below which degradation of signal does not occur? Or does the degradation simply continue to reduce as the length does, down to diminishing amounts that approach but are never zero?

Here you go. Speaker Wire

A small fraction of the stuff being sold is actually exceptionally good,

What constitutes exceptionally good speaker cable and how do you know that a small fraction of the stuff being sold is and not the large majority?

but there is no way for consumers to be sure which it is.

Are you sure? Or did you mean to say probably there is no way?

 

[Cal Weldon]

Time out. You all know why.
Check back later. Don't get your hopes up.