Good points too SY.
OT: If I can extract my digit, we may have a Red Light completed on the weekend.
OT: If I can extract my digit, we may have a Red Light completed on the weekend.
FWIW, I agree with GM about the Hawksford stuff being highly tenuous -just about all of this stuff was done to death by Bell Labs & other comapnies 70 years ago, and electrical transmission lines have been well understood for even longer. As Greg pointed out via this, thin wire is useful for apps where some series resistance is required & it should theoretically be better than a ceramic for this too. That's one of the reasons Fostex made solid tungsten cables, with lead shielding, for some of their demo systems a few years back.
There is an interesting notion around that as speakers are not perfect, and can transmit EMF back into the system, then the higher resistance wire will assist in damping these. Completely beyond my compentance to judge; as far as I'm concerened, when discussion of wire gets this far, we've reached The Far Side. It's interesting though, but my knowledge of physics dwindles from here on.
There is an interesting notion around that as speakers are not perfect, and can transmit EMF back into the system, then the higher resistance wire will assist in damping these. Completely beyond my compentance to judge; as far as I'm concerened, when discussion of wire gets this far, we've reached The Far Side. It's interesting though, but my knowledge of physics dwindles from here on.
Hi,
25ft (8m) of 0.5mm diameter copper has a resistance of 700mohm.
The flow and return will have a resistance of 1r4.
You are bonkers to even consider running single core of this diameter over this distance to speakers of 8ohm impedance.
The Q will have changed, completely upsetting any semblance of balance between the frequencies.
25ft (8m) of 0.5mm diameter copper has a resistance of 700mohm.
The flow and return will have a resistance of 1r4.
You are bonkers to even consider running single core of this diameter over this distance to speakers of 8ohm impedance.
The Q will have changed, completely upsetting any semblance of balance between the frequencies.
AndrewT said:
Bonkers, Eh?🙂
I have the cable. I have the speakers. Also in my bag of tricks I have a DMM.
Before actually using it for this purpose, I would have measured the impact it would have.
Heck, I could even test the drivers parameters through this cable with speaker workshop if I felt the need.
BTW, all of the above is still true, even if you were directing your "bonkers" comment at Dave.😉
planet10 said:
Hi Dave,
I take it you mean kynar or tefzel recomm by Mr. A.W. of VS? Is there noticable diff between kynar and tefzel as speaker wires inside baffles or used in amps? A bit OT, in amps have you only tried it at the input or for low level signals? I'm not sure if it can handle higher B+ for high level signals like driver and output stages, but if you compared it with high temp stranded hook up wire in this app have you noticed any difference in sq? Thank you.
FYI
The only time I've ever heard of problems with conductor skin effect is on a high speed (+2Gs signals) impedance matched PCB, the reason for the problem was due to how PCB's are manufactured, approx 1/4 to 1/2 of the copper track (top) is electroless plated copper, this has more resistivity than rolled copper, and was playing havock with the impedance control.
Her is an interesting take on inductance:-
"Inductance is a measure of the efficiency of the conductor to create rings of magnetic field lines, at the expence of current through the conductor" Dr E. Bogatin
I've been reading this and other threads on cables with great interest, as I have an intrest in the movement of electrons..
We are currently testing some peripherals over 1Km of Belden RS485 cable, when we are done I have an old "ghetto blaster" that I use to try and drive some speaker down the cable with, I'm curious as to what would happen.
Just measured resistance tadge over 100ohms
The only time I've ever heard of problems with conductor skin effect is on a high speed (+2Gs signals) impedance matched PCB, the reason for the problem was due to how PCB's are manufactured, approx 1/4 to 1/2 of the copper track (top) is electroless plated copper, this has more resistivity than rolled copper, and was playing havock with the impedance control.
Her is an interesting take on inductance:-
"Inductance is a measure of the efficiency of the conductor to create rings of magnetic field lines, at the expence of current through the conductor" Dr E. Bogatin
I've been reading this and other threads on cables with great interest, as I have an intrest in the movement of electrons..
We are currently testing some peripherals over 1Km of Belden RS485 cable, when we are done I have an old "ghetto blaster" that I use to try and drive some speaker down the cable with, I'm curious as to what would happen.
Just measured resistance tadge over 100ohms
John, If you do use cat5 make both cables the same length. I think you'll need something thicker. Perhaps trailer wire?
I knew this would start to degenerate. I just knew it. Almost every discussion about cables does at some point. A request: can we keep it polite please guys? Sweping statements like a person being 'bonkers' for using a long run of thin wire aren't exactly helpful.
Regarding thin wire changing the Q, yep, of course it does. I've mentioned this before myself. Qe & Re increase, Bl reduces. But is this automatically such a bad thing? Or can it in some cases actually provide a beneficial effect? (Er, yes, actually. Many people here know exactly what they are doing and why, and this is a deliberate goal) It's like adding a series resistor -common enough practice, so what's the problem? There is no univeral right or wrong. Aside from the sporadic worries about placing a ceramic in the signal path, very few people bat an eyelid if a person adds some series resistance to their FE206Es in MLTLs to re-balance the sound. I can't see how the manner they choose to do it in matters. Fostex do / did it for their demo kit, as I commented above, with tungsten cable. The thin wire may also bring a few things to the party that a resistor does not -positive and negative, just as there are positives and negatives with resistors.
Whatever works best for your particular goals is my take on it.
Regarding thin wire changing the Q, yep, of course it does. I've mentioned this before myself. Qe & Re increase, Bl reduces. But is this automatically such a bad thing? Or can it in some cases actually provide a beneficial effect? (Er, yes, actually. Many people here know exactly what they are doing and why, and this is a deliberate goal) It's like adding a series resistor -common enough practice, so what's the problem? There is no univeral right or wrong. Aside from the sporadic worries about placing a ceramic in the signal path, very few people bat an eyelid if a person adds some series resistance to their FE206Es in MLTLs to re-balance the sound. I can't see how the manner they choose to do it in matters. Fostex do / did it for their demo kit, as I commented above, with tungsten cable. The thin wire may also bring a few things to the party that a resistor does not -positive and negative, just as there are positives and negatives with resistors.
Whatever works best for your particular goals is my take on it.
OzMikeH said:
I have lots of different wire, not just the Cat 5e and the zip cord. I've got a nice 2 conductor stranded 18 gauge that was my original choice. It's jacket is yellow though.
Fact is the speakers involved are having the drivers driven seperately by seperate amps. Impedance for each driver is ~ 6 ohms. That will mean each LM3886 amp will be supplying a maximum of 82 watts to each driver, with the obvious bigger demand being the woofer.
I will try the cat 5 with 2 strands each for midrange and high
and 4 strands for the bass.
Scottmoose said:
My thought exactly. Added line resistance in my case increases impedance and reduces current draw.
Helps to keep my amps running cooler.
Scottmoose said:
Tungsten ? They certainly had to hade put a lot of design effort to make the cables flexible, or made them very thin. Anyway it had to be expen$ive...
I once worked in an impulse magnetizer and needed some power resistors to pass about 5000 Amps to damp the response of the system. I used a several parallell runs of a couple inches of mild iron wire and it worked like a charm.
Scottmoose said:
Well, whether they are perfect or not, it doesn't affect much the results, as the fact of transmitting back EMF has to do with the physics of the transducer. Now if you meant induced EMF, that also has nothing to do with the perfectness of the transducer but with the geometry of the "antenna". Twisted pair greatly reduces induced differential mode noise but can do nothing against common mode noise.
IMO, at the levels of signals and impedances we are usually dealing with, one should be in a place with *very high* EMI to worry about it. And if it were me who lived in a place such as that, I would consider moving because of my health rather than the sound quality of my system 🙂
Also, at the frequencies we deal with, parallel runs of wire separated by a couple inches of air should make no differences unless making them go over or around leaky transformers or choke input filter chokes. But that would be stressing for twisted, shielded or whatever cables we talk about.
Gastón
For those of us new to the world of DIY audio and full range speakers, valve amps etc, who previous audiophile education was Audio magazines, manufacturers data etc, using CAT5 or any thin cable goes against what you were led to belive.
I would not have belived it at first, and when Scott suggested using CAT 5 on my first self build project I almost had a fit (especialy as I had just paid a few quid a metre for some new speaker wire). Having sat back, and read lots of threads etc on speaker wire, and tests people have done, it starts to make sense and of course rolled up about 30 quids worth of cable and replaced it with some free Cat 5.
I still find it almost "the other sideish" when I look at my bannana plugs with this anemic thin cable sticking out.
I was also amazed at things like skin effect being touted by cable manufacturers, but then I should now that marketing has little relationship with truth, the trouble is these "facts" get rammed down your throat so much you eventualy stop questioning things and belive them. Thats part of the fun of all this, you have to look at your perseptions and question them.
In my case this was one of the hardest for me to change my view on.
I would not have belived it at first, and when Scott suggested using CAT 5 on my first self build project I almost had a fit (especialy as I had just paid a few quid a metre for some new speaker wire). Having sat back, and read lots of threads etc on speaker wire, and tests people have done, it starts to make sense and of course rolled up about 30 quids worth of cable and replaced it with some free Cat 5.
I still find it almost "the other sideish" when I look at my bannana plugs with this anemic thin cable sticking out.
I was also amazed at things like skin effect being touted by cable manufacturers, but then I should now that marketing has little relationship with truth, the trouble is these "facts" get rammed down your throat so much you eventualy stop questioning things and belive them. Thats part of the fun of all this, you have to look at your perseptions and question them.
In my case this was one of the hardest for me to change my view on.
Cheers Brett.
Gaston -yeah, I don't know if Fostex have done the tungsten-cable thing for a while, or if any sets made it outside Japan or the US. I've never seen them in the metal, though I know a little about them. A power lead & pair of speaker wires weighed in at ~60lbs apiece, interconnects at 30lbs with their lead-damped jackets, for a total wiring loom weight of 150lbs. Sets were were hand-built by Miyanohara-san, the driver designer -you had to be known to him personally for him to build you a set. They were usually used in conjunction with Accuphase class A SS amps. IIRC, the speaker cables, assuming they'd build you a set, would set you back ~$2,500. Wince. You could probably DIY it for a reasonable sum, or something similar, but I gather the engineering was 'substantial', and lead isn't nice stuff to work with. I'll leave that to those who are a lot more enthusiastic about wire than I am. 😉
I wasn't talking about RFI or induced EMF -the remark is not mine actually, it's Lynn Olson's. http://www.nutshellhifi.com/library/ETF2.html Whatever the nomenclature used, speakers are well known to behave as microphones http://sound.westhost.com/biamp-vs-passive.htm It was remarked to me elsewhere that this is possibly one reason SETs & zero feedback amps with a single gain-stage have a reputation for clarity, as they're not smearing the sound with distorted feedback.
Whether you then continue the thought & buy into the theory that using resistive wire can help attenuate back-interference, so it can no longer react with non-linearities in the amplifier's output stage & distort the forward path is up to you. I presented an interesting take that some people might not have run across before for information purposes only. It should be fairly easy to measure any alterations on a speaker with a decent impulse response though, should anyone feel like looking into it.
Gaston -yeah, I don't know if Fostex have done the tungsten-cable thing for a while, or if any sets made it outside Japan or the US. I've never seen them in the metal, though I know a little about them. A power lead & pair of speaker wires weighed in at ~60lbs apiece, interconnects at 30lbs with their lead-damped jackets, for a total wiring loom weight of 150lbs. Sets were were hand-built by Miyanohara-san, the driver designer -you had to be known to him personally for him to build you a set. They were usually used in conjunction with Accuphase class A SS amps. IIRC, the speaker cables, assuming they'd build you a set, would set you back ~$2,500. Wince. You could probably DIY it for a reasonable sum, or something similar, but I gather the engineering was 'substantial', and lead isn't nice stuff to work with. I'll leave that to those who are a lot more enthusiastic about wire than I am. 😉
I wasn't talking about RFI or induced EMF -the remark is not mine actually, it's Lynn Olson's. http://www.nutshellhifi.com/library/ETF2.html Whatever the nomenclature used, speakers are well known to behave as microphones http://sound.westhost.com/biamp-vs-passive.htm It was remarked to me elsewhere that this is possibly one reason SETs & zero feedback amps with a single gain-stage have a reputation for clarity, as they're not smearing the sound with distorted feedback.
Whether you then continue the thought & buy into the theory that using resistive wire can help attenuate back-interference, so it can no longer react with non-linearities in the amplifier's output stage & distort the forward path is up to you. I presented an interesting take that some people might not have run across before for information purposes only. It should be fairly easy to measure any alterations on a speaker with a decent impulse response though, should anyone feel like looking into it.
Scottmoose said:
Interesting. I will do the same as you and go the copper way rather than using strategic metals and have a lot of nosy people on my back for a long time. 🙂
Scottmoose said:
That POV is interesting too...
My first microphone ever was an old car loudspeaker coupled to an OPT, that gave me an impedance (and signal level) enough to drive the input of a valve radio that as was usual had a "phonocaptor" input. I even used them in PA service in my school in a couple of small shows !!! Lotsa fun 🙂
And regarding the back-EMF, the first responsible of it is the mass of the moving parts of the driver, that oppose to the movement that the voice coil tries to induce. That, plus echoes, fluid (air) nonlinearities and a lot of other factors make the speaker / amplifier / room a feedback system (yeah!) really complex to model in detail.
As I think I told in James' forum, the impedance of the cable (in its simplest representation, a pure resistance) helps to contour that complex system response. Whether we like or not the results will make a system/cable sound good, bad, and whatever in the middle.
Cheers
Gastón
fred76 said:
I've not used as speaker wire -- too fiddly. AW is indeed one of those 2 gurus. He taught me about tube amps and i helped him out with his Macs.
dave
So at what point (length or maximum resistance value for example) will the single strand trick stop paying off and cause trouble? Can it harm the amp? My runs right now are about 6 feet. I'm planning to increase the runs to 10 feet to see if more is better 🙂 For the next experiment I will use one conductor in the cat5 bundle for + and one conductor in a separate cat5 bundle for -.
I am using shielded cable right now. Has anyone found positives or negatives with shielded vs non shielded?
I am using shielded cable right now. Has anyone found positives or negatives with shielded vs non shielded?
I use 10'. Measured a set (with 1 end shorted) at 0.7 ohms. I keep my wires clear of other wires (and just because that is how it works out) largely in the air.
If there is an optimum length it will be system dependent.
dave
If there is an optimum length it will be system dependent.
dave
Shielded can help in an environment rich with RFI, though you'd have to really be going some to corrupt a speaker-level signal audibly. I have to run mine behind a PC, TV, DVD, VHS, monitor, & the PSUs of all their attendent equipement & I don't have a problem. There's also a 2000w linear amplifier for 'ham radio duties less than 10' away. Interconnects I prefer to be shielded though as the signal is far weaker, and more prone to corruption.
Can thin wire harm the amp? Not AFAIK. A Naim or NVA amp might throw a major fit if you tried using CV's (or any other) multiple-braided, very high capacitance Cat5 design as they rely on some cable-inductance for their own stability (they have no zobel over their output stage), but that doesn't apply to the ultra-minimal approach.
Gaston -me too -an old speaker ripped from a dead portable tape-deck was my first mike. Much entertainment was had... 🙂 Re the rest, yes, that's basically my take on it too -as I spend a lot of time with back-loaded horn variations, I've learned to keep an eye on the room, given that it forms the CC in a BLH.
Can thin wire harm the amp? Not AFAIK. A Naim or NVA amp might throw a major fit if you tried using CV's (or any other) multiple-braided, very high capacitance Cat5 design as they rely on some cable-inductance for their own stability (they have no zobel over their output stage), but that doesn't apply to the ultra-minimal approach.
Gaston -me too -an old speaker ripped from a dead portable tape-deck was my first mike. Much entertainment was had... 🙂 Re the rest, yes, that's basically my take on it too -as I spend a lot of time with back-loaded horn variations, I've learned to keep an eye on the room, given that it forms the CC in a BLH.
Scottmoose said:
Both these assume a certain amount of inductance in the wire -- the designers think output Zobels trash the sonics.
dave
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