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In Reply to: RE: Speaker wire cover suggestions. posted by jupiterboy on September 24, 2009 at 18:15:59
Different polymer dielectrics have different sonic influences on the speaker-level signal. Nylon is terrible, as is PVC. Unfortunately, many cables have braided or solid jackets made of these materials.
AFAIK, cotton is the most neutral material you can use.
Shielding speaker cables is tricky. The shield can increase the cable capacitance and concentrate the electric fields in less-than-optimum dielectric materials. It can also act as an independent RF resonator, and magnify existing RF noise at particular frequencies.
You also have the problem of whether and how to ground the shield. Some amps produce what amounts to a balanced speaker signal, where the voltage on each wire is symmetrical around the earth potential, and some amps produce a single-ended signal, where the (typically) [+] wire carries the signal and the [-] wire carries the return at essentially earth potential.
Grounding the shield to the [-] wire works for the latter, but unbalances the former. Grounding the shield to the AC safety-earth could introduce more noise than the shield prevents.
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