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Topic: Biwiring and Cables (Read 16644 times) previous topic - next topic
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Biwiring and Cables

Reply #25 –
Quote
Responding to original question:

It has been my experience that there can be a major difference between speaker cables. Especially really long ones like mine - 5-8 meters from amplifier to speakers.

You can buy very expensive speaker cables. Be aware that some are designed to manipulate the sound. These might sound better depending on the accoustic condition of your listening room and your other audio components. These types of cables are not neccesarily the best.
Yes, there can be major differences in speaker cables, due to inadequate gauge size, not due to any kind of construction differences though.  Read through the article I linked to originally.  The subjective side of audio and people's expectations has more to do with differences heard than any actual difference.  These non-existant differences were heard and raved about in the labs of John Dunlavy who engineered some terriffic speakers and I'm sure demo'd them in acoustically treated rooms hooked up to some top end amplification and playback units. 

Long and short of it, your comment that if somebody thinks their colored wire will sound better, that the person will enjoy listening more over that wires is very true.  I personally don't find that a good argument for running out and spending $6/ft or more on speaker wire.  You're far better off investing in speakers, accoustic treatments, or a decent pair of shielded interconnects (though I don't buy into the idea that there is $3000 worth of difference between radio shack's shielded gold-plated interconnects and the ultra high-end interconnects available in snake oil stores).  I do own Monster Z Reference S-Video cables and I have actually seen a difference between those and the Video-2 cables, predominantly in image noise.  I do believe that good quality and shielding is worth paying a few bucks for.  Cost wise, wherever I can I'd run $20 optical cables into my receiver and dump money into getting a good pre-amp section with superb DAC's so I don't have to worry about my interconnects. 

Quote
I have tried several cables over the years. I tested the the cheap ($4/meter) thick cobber cables with hundreds of thin cobber threads inside some 10 years ago. I did not like them, but they were very easy to install. I used some expensive ($30/meter) solid cobber core cables from AudioQuest  for years, but threw them away when I discovered something better: Cat5 twisted pair cables used for computer networks. It must be the installation type with the solid core - not the soft core cables with plugs. This cable is very cheap ($0.30/meter) and it sounds very well in my ears. It is however vitally important to connect it properly (I do not know the details of why it needs to be done). The cable consists of four wire pairs. The four pairs each have two wires - full colour and half colour - twisted around eachother. The four pairs are twisted themselves. You must connect the full colour to one pole and the half colour to another pole. You can in theory biwire your speakers with one of these cable.  Use two pairs for high-range and two pairs for low ranges. But the cable is very thin. I use six cables per speaker - two for upper frequencies and four for lower frequencies. If you connect all 8 wires in a cable to one pole, you are doing it wrong. If you use multiple cables, connect all full coloured wires from all cables to one pole and the rest to the other. This cable is not shielded, so it is very important to keep it away from power cables as written above. 

If you choose this cable, you might want to consider banan plugs. It is hard to remove the teflon isolation from the wires. And it takes some time to do it on the 16 cables I have used for my 5.0 surround...

As for using CAT5 for speaker wire, it's certainly a decent option since it's not that expensive in bulk, tends to be decently flexible, and naturally gives you a positive versus negative differentiation with the white/color versus solid color strands.  As to whether using those pairs or doing some of the complicated braiding techniques listed on the web actually makes a difference, I'm going to have to vote that the results are highly subjective here too.  The braiding instructions you can find elsewhere certainly make a nicely wound cable that isn't messy and has a unique appeal, not to mention alot of pride marks for the persons patient enough to endure the ordeal.  However, after investing several days of my own time suffering through the absolute tedium of constructing these cables on the expectation that they will outperform even the most highly priced speaker cables available, you'd better believe they'll sound better to me.

Quote
Interference from power cables can affect sound very much. It is possible worse in USA than EU, because of the 110V/240V difference. Lower voltage = higher power, but don't kill me if I'm wrong. Anyway, keep all your signal and speaker cables away from power cables. Do not roll long cables up or tangle them together. An induction effect can be created and it does not sound good. If it is impossible to keep signal cables away from power cables, use shielded cables. Either shielded power cables or shielded signal cables or both (might not be needed).
Shielding on speaker cables is generally unneccessary, unlike shielding on interconnects.  Unless I'm mistaken, speaker cables carry a high enough current that any noise picked up across the run is many dB down from the actual signal level and is probably at a current that I doubt would set most tweeters vibrating, much less the woofers and mid/bass drivers actually cable of generating the 60Hz hum you'll pick up off inductance from a power cable.  Most certainly, route your interconnects away from power lines and use a good shielded cable, but you don't have to worry about speaker cabling.  If anything, keep your speaker cabling further away from your interconnects.

While we're on the subject of cabling, can someone explain how 6ft of a super thick "audiophile grade" power cable can negate the "negative" effects of the miles of transmission lines between the power station and the electrical outlet in my home?  Or, how it can suddenly increase things over the performance of the in-home electrical wiring running through my walls?  Assuming that I'm not using a power cable with 24 gauge copper running down the middle and am instead running something closer or equal to the gauge of in-home wiring, I'm going to have to go with the "I'm being gyped" answer here too if I'm spending more than $20 on a standard 3-prong removable power cable like you find on a PC.

Well, that's enough ranting for me tonight.  I do find it very interesting that some of the people around here or elsewhere that demand ABX results on the understanding that our brains will trick us into hearing differences and therefore we must statistically divorce our brains from our expectations could possibly argue against the evidence borne out in blind tests that most of what we hear over "audiophile" cables is exactly this mental trickery.  I'd be willing to bet that many of the people subscribing to the expensive cable is better theory are also those who would refuse to spend the time ABX'ing the output of audio encoders because they already insist that what they use sounds best.

[edit, diced up the quoting and positioned it for relevance]

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #26 –
gdougherty, I agree on nearly everything:

About interconnects, I think that unless you have special EMI (interference) problems at your house, regular interconnects will be fine. Even a better shielded interconnects don't need to be expensive at all.

As to CAT5 braided cables, the effect of doing such a construction is to decrease inductance and increase capacitance of the cables. Capacitance is not a problem with any decent amplifier. Inductance can have slight audible consequences in case of very long cable runs and/or very low impedance exotic speakers. For usual lengths and most speakers, I think inductance of regular speaker cable doesn't have audible consequences.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #27 –
When a single 4 mm2 cable is used and a 1000 Hz sine is played at 1w, there is 1w in 4 mm2.
When bi-wiring with two 4 mm2 cables and a 1000 Hz sine is played at 1W, there is still 1W in 4mm2 (the woofer cable only).

The current being cut into two parts by the passive crossover of the speaker, the effect of the resistance of the cable on the speaker response will be the same mono or biwiring. The only difference is that the cable will heat more in mono cabling.
Thus, if I'm correct, it is wrong to say that the resistance is divided by 2, it is the same in mono or bi wiring.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #28 –
Quote
Thus, if I'm correct, it is wrong to say that the resistance is divided by 2, it is the same in mono or bi wiring.

Yes, you're right, in practice resistance remains the same.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #29 –
I studied electronics for a short while many years ago. I shall be the first to admit that many aspects of audio cabling sounds crazy. But when the audioble difference is more than obvious then I choose to trust my ears and my fellow audio nerds.

Here is an advanced version of the cat5 cable I suggested. It use 7 cables per speaker and it takes forever to braid the cables. Several people has made this cable and  reviewed it.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #30 –
Quote
But when the audioble difference is more than obvious then I choose to trust my ears and my fellow audio nerds.

Still, I remain skeptic, there are many factors that could have an influence in your tests: with "exotic" amps (Naim for example) those high capacitance cables can make an audible difference (for worse, in theory). Maybe if capacitance is high enough, it can have an audible effect even on properly designed amps, but always for worse (post-ringing due to amp unstability).
With very hard to drive speakers or very long cables, there might be an audible difference due to the reduced inductance. At last, all possible differences should be possible to measure.

Of course, It is very important the way the tests were performed (you know, double-blind, without movig speakers at all, etc).

Quote
Several people has made this cable and  reviewed it.


Sorry, I don't believe in "audiophile" reviews, and less if they are of cables. Not to say that among those reviews there are some of silver interconnects or power cords... I've read enough absurd reviews of these kind not to take them seriously at all.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #31 –
Quote
Sorry, I don't believe in "audiophile" reviews, and less if they are of cables. Not to say that among those reviews there are some of silver interconnects or power cords... I've read enough absurd reviews of these kind not to take them seriously at all.

Well I do not believe in self-proclaimed "experts". Every expert has holes in his/hers knowledge. And for every statement made, you can find another self-proclaimed "expert" claiming the exact opposite. Many experts get paid for being an expert. That can influence their judgement a lot.

If you dismiss every statement made by so called "audiophiles", then you are being blinded by your knowledge.
If you assume that all 46 reviews comes from your so called "audiophiles", then you are generalising without proper cause.
If you assume that every audiophile relying on his ears instead of trusting the generally accepted knowledge is crazy and writes absurd reviews, then you are again generalising without proper cause.

It is very hard to evaluate the statements of audiophiles against the statements of "experts". I rarely make specific recommendations when it comes to audio. I believe that people should read the posts and draw their own conclusions. In this case I have made an exception by suggesting a very cheap cable that I use and like myself. Most people should be able to afford the $10 and a few hours for experimenting. Everyone can hear for themselves on their own stereo how bi-wiring sounds, how using A+B instead og A for bi-wiring sounds etc.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #32 –
Well, when I call somebody an expert (which I don't consider myself), is because he has worked on that issue for long time and has real technical knowledge over the subject, not just "this sounds awesome" and "this sounds crap" type of audiophile comment.

Said that, I prefer to support technically-based opinions than purely subjective-subject to placebo ones. Depending on who talks, I will trust him in regards to his subjective opinion on how something sounds, but classic "audiophile-type" opinion regarding sound of audio equipment is not trustable for me.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #33 –
Quote
I want to buy decent cables for my speakers and was wondering on how the setup should be.

The speakers in question (Infinity Alpha 40) is biwirable. My amp has two pairs of speaker outputs. In this case which one is a better idea: to use biwiring cables or use separate wires using both of the speaker outputs on my amp? If I use separate identical cables, does the length make difference?

[span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%']The two sets of connectors on your amplifier are for two different sets of speakers. They are not for bi-wiring[/span]

(I appologise if someone already said this - I read this thread for as long as I had the patience to, and didn't see it)

If you are going to bi-wire, bring both sets of wires from the same connectors on the amp.


I bi-wired once. It sounded better than before at first. But since I was changing from 2x20m of bell wire to 4x4m of real speaker cable, that was hardly a surprise. You can say I was imagining it, but on many recordings it made them sound too bright, so I actually preferred the bell wire. The placeabo effect doesn't usually work that way around! I could swap between both sets of cables, but obviously it wasn't a blind test.


Bi- or Tri- amping is great. But there are probably more cost-effective ways of improving the sound.

Cheers,
David.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #34 –
Quote
Hi Atici, you have to be careful about articles like the one in the above link.  Its very similiar to sites like www.pcabx.com that use test equipment instead of ears to measure audio equipment.

HA regulars, as soon as you read this, you should have known better than to reply!

Here, we are objectivists. We are now arguing with a subjectivist (who has probably strayed out of rec.audio.opinion). You might as well try to get an athiest and an evangelical to agree with each other!*


"Its very similiar to sites like www.pcabx.com that use test equipment instead of ears to measure audio equipment."

And in what way does ABXing use "test equipment" - it uses ears, and only ears!


Leaving aside psychoacoustic codecs (which intentionally trick the ears) some of the smartest people in audio engineering hold the view that everything can be measured. Not all, but most. There are a few of these clever folks who have attacked the weakest link (loudspeakers) with a pure scientific (i.e. measurement based) approach, and have acheived remarkable results. But the results are expensive to manufacture, as well as research.

Some of the richest people in audio marketing know that most people don't understand or trust science. The people who are most artistic (music is an artform!) are often (but not always) least scientific. So they try to find a different way to sell their audio products. They tap into the near-mythical to explain why their brand is better than the rest. Call it nonsense, BS, or wishful thinking.

Even more remarkable is the fact that so few people oppose them. But then, there's no profit in convincing non-scientific people of your scientific facts, because they can't tell the genuine physics from the snake oil. If you can't beat 'em...


My answer is: use your ears. You are probably more discerning than you are allowed to believe, because Hi-Fi magazines want to you think that only they know how to listen - otherwise, why but them? (there are some good ones btw!) If you are not discerning, and can't hear the difference, then look on that as a blessing, and spend your money on something else that will give you pleasure. If you can hear the difference, listen long and hard before spending your money. By long and hard, I mean months, if not years. If you can't wait that long, buy a cheap system in the interim.

After buying your dream system, forget the hi-fi and enjoy the music.

Cheers,
David.

(one foot in each camp: 3/4 objectivist, 1/4 subjectivist!
*100% evangelical, so I hope I can write that without causing offense)

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #35 –
Yep... I'm more of an objectivist, but I try not to be mind-closed (BTW, ABX tests ARE subjective tests, but made with a scientific approach). I believe in things when they are proved enough. But 99.9% of "audiophile-type" reports don't have the conditions to be considered proof of anything.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #36 –
By the way, I'm 100% of the opinion of that any audible differences can be measured... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #37 –
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[  The reason that gold connection surfaces are often used and are generally desireable is that they don't oxidize (or "rust") easily, keeping electrical contacts performing well for a long time even under adverse conditions.  Both silver and copper oxidize relatively quickly making gold an excellent/preferred choice for connectors.  For cost reasons copper is an excellent choice for conductors (the actual wire), with some high-end designs affording silver conductors.

Silver may oxidize easily, but the kicker is that silver oxide conducts virtually as well as
the fresh shiny stuff. 

The place that silver wire may pay off with its high conductivity is where you can't
just bump up the wire size without affecting something else.  Speaker coils for instance.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #38 –
But silver has a pay-off. It weights more than copper, so it should not be the wisest choice for speaker coils. In fact, top Sennheiser headphones are made of aluminium, which is worse conductor than copper but weights less.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #39 –
Quote
[span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%']The two sets of connectors on your amplifier are for two different sets of speakers. They are not for bi-wiring[/span]

(I appologise if someone already said this - I read this thread for as long as I had the patience to, and didn't see it)

Why? It's the same thing physically. It's a parallel connection, but the split occurs inside the Amp rather than on the cable. I heard many good arguments supporting such a connection too (for instance you can run only low(woofer) or high(mid+tweeter) of your speakers separately by turning on/off either of the speaker outputs of your Amp).
The object of mankind lies in its highest individuals.
One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
 

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #40 –
Quote
Quote
Hi Atici, you have to be careful about articles like the one in the above link.  Its very similiar to sites like www.pcabx.com that use test equipment instead of ears to measure audio equipment.

HA regulars, as soon as you read this, you should have known better than to reply!

Here, we are objectivists. We are now arguing with a subjectivist (who has probably strayed out of rec.audio.opinion). You might as well try to get an athiest and an evangelical to agree with each other!*

. . . So they try to find a different way to sell their audio products.

My answer is: use your ears. . . After buying your dream system, forget the hi-fi and enjoy the music.

No, I did not wander out of rec.whatever..., I do not sell audio equipment, (though I worked as a technician in an audio store, along with a short stint in a recording studio and some years as a "roadie"), but most important of all, I don't want to "argue" about this.  I do think its a very interesting topic however, and I will be the first to stand up and wave the flag of "enlightenment" if its ever truly proven that there isn't now, and could never be an audible difference in an audio system, with different speaker wire.

My comments about pcabx.com come from my personal experience with site, which I have only used to read about the sound card comparison.  I did peruse some of the other pages, but not all.  As near as I can tell, all sound card evaluations are based on how they "measured-up" using SpectraLAB softare.  I've never seen anywhere where Arny Krueger mentions listening to the sound cards and with what equipment.  Arny Krueger is notorious for the classic evaluating of speaker cable based on its DC resistance, which, of course, has nothing to do with how it might sound in a given system.  I don't mean to sound like I'm knocking Mr. Krueger here, but he is, as you point out, objective, and while that may be good for understanding electrical specs, it is not necessarily good for "listening to music" tests.

Quote
Still, I remain skeptic, there are many factors that could have an influence in your tests: with "exotic" amps (Naim for example) those high capacitance cables can make an audible difference (for worse, in theory). Maybe if capacitance is high enough, it can have an audible effect even on properly designed amps, but always for worse (post-ringing due to amp unstability).
With very hard to drive speakers or very long cables, there might be an audible difference due to the reduced inductance. At last, all possible differences should be possible to measure.


And this is what makes this discussion all the more frustrating sometimes.  KikeG is specifically mentioning the type of things that may cause one speaker wire to sound different than another.  The "listener" will then decide which is "better", not some piece of test equipment, obviously except in gross mismatch cases.

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... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago.


This is so wrong that once again, I have to believe we're talking apples and oranges here.  Sure, test equipment can measure THD better than my ears can, but they can never convey which sounds better.  Evaluating technical specifications is surely objective, determining what sounds good is purely subjective, but I do agree that many manufacturers and retail stores try to correlate one to the other falsely.

2Bdecided said:  "After buying your dream system, forget the hi-fi and enjoy the music."

I think we're so close to being on the same page here, but somehow getting there through vastly different paths.   

Dex

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #41 –
Quote
I've never seen anywhere where Arny Krueger mentions listening to the sound cards and with what equipment.

Well... Arny Krueger has two sites: pcavtech.com is all about measurements, and pcabx.com is all about listening tests, including actual audio files to download and perform your own listening tests.

Quote
And this is what makes this discussion all the more frustrating sometimes.  KikeG is specifically mentioning the type of things that may cause one speaker wire to sound different than another.  The "listener" will then decide which is "better", not some piece of test equipment, obviously except in gross mismatch cases.


As to measurements, it depends. For example, in case of interconnects, measurable differences are tens or hundreds of times below know audibility tresholds, so measuremens do say something here. In case of speaker cable, frequency response differences below 0.1 dB are very common, being 0.1 dB considered as just undetectable, and higher values may be detectable under optimum conditions.

Quote
Quote

... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago.


This is so wrong that once again, I have to believe we're talking apples and oranges here.  Sure, test equipment can measure THD better than my ears can, but they can never convey which sounds better.  Evaluating technical specifications is surely objective, determining what sounds good is purely subjective, but I do agree that many manufacturers and retail stores try to correlate one to the other falsely.


Well, what I said is that " I'm 100% of the opinion of that any audible differences can be measured... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago". I didn't say anything at that paragraph about how measured differences relate to subjective preference. Measurements are good to objectively know differences among audio equipment, and to know how relevant are those differences. If there are differences that can be considered relevant, how they relate to perceived audio quality is a much more complex (and subjective) issue. However, if you go for transparency, the better the measurements, the better the equipment.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #42 –
Addition to my previous post:

Note, I always talk about audible differences, not better or worse sounding. And if at any time I say that something can be "bad" in this context, I mean it deviates from ideal (from a technical point of view) behaviour, or what comes to be the same, from sonic transparency.


(Admins: Edit does not work well, makes strange things. Editing this post works fine, but editing previous doesn't).

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #43 –
Quote
By the way, I'm 100% of the opinion of that any audible differences can be measured... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago.

The thing is...

maybe you can measure everything that you can hear. And you can't hear everything that you can measure.

BUT it's not always trivial to correlate what you're measuring with what you're hearing. Sometimes you're measuring (and hence improving) the wrong thing.


If you think this is nonsense, let me use audio coding as an example. Lots of fair/poor audio codecs sound like they increase or decrease the trebble; but they exhibit a meaurably flat frequency reponse. The cause? It's usually a temporal effect - subtle smearing of transients or somesuch. This is quite difficult to spot in the waveform or spectrogram during real music, even though it's easy using castanets.wav with an mp3 encoder. It's totally impossible to catch using a frequency response measurement. But it sounds like the frequency response has changed.

I give this example because I know why it happens. The point is, with some of the perceived changes in sound, we don't know why the occurr. i.e. we don't know what to measure to find the effect. It's probably already there in the measurements, but we don't know quite where to look. Sure, if we had a system which measured perfectly in every single dimension, they wouldn't occurr. But no such system exists. With a real world system, with many many many known non-idealities, it's sometimes difficult to know which measurement is relevant to what we're hearing.

What really makes life difficult is that some of the biggest measured problems can be inaudible (Try measuring the SNR of mpc standard!), while some of the smallest can have an audible effect (exceptionally quiet "very early reflections" can have a huge impact on the perceived spectrum of a sound, without changing the measured frequency response).


So, yes, if you can hear it, you can measure it. But it's the ears that have to lead the measurements. To say "this measurement says the device is perfect, but my ears say it sounds horrible - I'll ignore my ears" would be a stupid approach!

To say"this measurement says the device is perfect, but my ears say it sounds horrible - the device must be doing something near-magical that I can't measure - I'll never measure anything again!" would also be a stupid approach!

Cheers,
David.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #44 –
Sorry Dex - I didn't mean to offend, and I know you're not trying to sell us Hi-Fi equipment!


I probably disagree on "subjectively better". Or maybe I don't... If you mean "sounds nice to me" then I don't care what sounds nicer to you - I want something that sounds like the original event. If we accept that this can't happen, then I guess we all buy whatever sounds like the lesser evil to each one of us, which gets us back to "sounds nice to me".


I can only bring my experience at university forward in this, because I've never played with "serious" Hi-Fi (of the cost you mention) at home.

1. On a system which was designed so that the measured frequency response was flatter than anything you have ever heard in your life, the results were jaw dropping. We had Ken Kesler in (Hi-fi Journo), and we couldn't shift him - he played CD after CD after CD, and loved it. He wrote it up as the best system he'd heard...
http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_...press.html#HiFi

2. On that same system, it would have good days and bad days. Maybe there was a software fault which meant at was actually different on different days - but this is unlikely. It was subjective, but it wasn't subtle - we'd walk in and agree that it sounded like a dog, using the same recording that had sounded great the previous day, and would probably sound great the next day. It did sound better after it had been left on for hours (even days). It (sometimes) sounded much better at night. What was it? Variable RF interference from several thousand PCs on campus? Temperature changes? Us in different moods (but why all of us?!) We never found out.


The interesting thing is that the response was only "perfectly" flat at one point in space. At other points, it was still better than most systems, but at that one point, it was "nearly perfect". What was amazing is that most people could find that tiny sweet spot. Not just audiophiles, but people who thought their ghetto blaster was good! Whether they liked it was a different matter - some people wanted more bass, and some recordings always sounded too bright. But don't you find it strange that in a world where we go after "what sounds nice to me", objective measured perfection, when nearly achieved, was usually preferable? And even preferable to "very nearly as good but not quite"?

Cheers,
David.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #45 –
@2Bdecided:

Quote
BUT it's not always trivial to correlate what you're measuring with what you're hearing. Sometimes you're measuring (and hence improving) the wrong thing.


I don't think this is nonsense at all, I agree. I'd say that what is difficult sometimes is to analyze the measured (or better say "recorded") differences. It is also difficult sometimes to correlate the differences found with the perceived differences. For example, in recent Pio2001's soundcard challenge, I can definitely hear (ABX)differences in some of the samples. However, analyzing the samples, there are objective differences, but it is difficult to fully know what those consist of. There's a pitch difference of around 0.002% IIRC, which can't account for perceived differences.  Due to this pitch difference, it's dificult to perform a reliable "classic" FFT or time analysis. Probably there's something more (DAT resampling?) , but with my actual means it's impossible to see what.

I think, however, that given the proper test signals, the proper equipment and the proper knowledge and time, anything can be measured, analyzed and characterized. For devices aimed to be linear (classic hi-fi equipment), it is not very difficult to know what to measure, in most cases. In case of more complex processes, such as resampling or lossy compression, it can be more difficult and even require complex additional processing, for example. In case of Pio's test, what is lacking is a proper analysis of the play/rec chain using the adequate test signals and an analysis of the results.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #46 –
Quote
....The difference between zip cord and "good" speaker cables comes from a phenomenon known as the "skin effect".  Audio frequencys travel through the skin, or outside edge of a wire.  So, good wires are made up of many small wires, braided in such a way as to maximize phase-coherency that might be smeared by inductive interaction in larger wires.....

Dex

If this is what you attribute the difference in sound from speaker cable to, then you need some education.

Skin effects have no significant affect at the frequencies used in audio; they only come into play at higher frequencies typically used in video applications where such an argument for more expensive cables might be valid.

If you want to argue about the benefits of expensive speaker cable go right ahead, but don't attribute it to something that can and has been proven to make no difference.

In case you hadn't guessed I subscribe to the, thick enough and that's all that matters camp.  I'm sure that some cables sound different to others, but that is most likely because they have been engineered to colour the sound, they are not going to be more accurate or "better", just different.

[Edit]  Just for fun I typed "skin effect audio" into google, the very first link gives a resonable explanation of the subject.
http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/audiop...fect_Cables.htm

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #47 –
I did the same calculus, though using the complete formula for the skin effect in a cylindrical condictor, and came to the same conclusion.
But none of use have calculated the effect of inductance, because don't forget that the skin effect increases the apparent resistance and the apparent inductance.

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #48 –
2Bdecided:  As I look back at my post, the bold emphasis did make it appear that I may have been offended.  Sorry for that, I wasn't.   

KikeG:  Thanks for the other ABX link.  I'll check it out.  One of the aspects of audio that helps "muddy-the-waters" of balancing the objective and subjective parts of all this, at least for me , I can best illustrate by example.  I can "tweak" my system to where I think it sounds best, and my wife thinks its too "bright".  Obviously, measurement doesn't really play a part here, because were both listening to the same thing at the same time.  Something different is happening between the ear and the brain.  It is along these lines that I find it difficult sometimes to correlate a "specification" with what I hear, or quantify this to a "good" or "bad" sound. 

Daneel:  I originaly got that notion from an "engineering note" that I read back in the days when I was a tech at an audio store.  I don't remember its source, but there's a very good chance that it was literature from one of the speaker cable manufacturers that we sold.  In my defense, I did state in the next paragraph that it was "arguable" to the relevance of this.

You are, however, quite correct when you say I ". . . need some education."     
Fortunately, this forum is supplying some. 


One of the last points I want to make is: my view on the whole "audible effect of speaker wire" debate, comes fundamentally from listening to two "audiophile" speaker cables on a friends system about 20 years ago.  This was in  the analog days.  I can't remember all the specifics of his system, (he owned the audio store, by the way), but I remember it was a Sumiko cartridge on a Rabco arm, can't remember the base, played through an Audio Research pre-amp, Classe' amp, and whatever the top of the line Magnapans were at that time. (They were four panels.)  Anyway, there very definitely was a difference, albeit subtle, between the two cables.  Neither of us had any bias towards either cable, we just wanted to see if there was a difference. 

This is why I take the position I do when these speaker wire discussions come up.  I can't necessarily state why one cable sounds better, or perhaps I should say, different, than another.  I just know they do.  But even that statement needs qualification.  The difference, I believe, will only be realized in a very expensive system. 

Dex

Biwiring and Cables

Reply #49 –
Quote
The difference, I believe, will only be realized in a very expensive system. 

And will only be reliable if done under blind conditions.