I start this thread to explain you an easy way to find your wire's best direction by ear. You'll need a high-end system to do this. If your system is transparent enough and well built, it should be pretty easy.
1. Take the piece of wire without looking at its markings. Glue a piece of masking tape at one random end.
2. Prepare just one speaker with one amplifier for mono mode. Disconnect your positive speaker cable. Put the test wire instead the positive speaker cable. The negative speaker cable is left untouched.
(Make sure your system is wired in the absolute phase. To do a quick phase test, you can put a small DC voltage across the RCA plug, depending of the sensitivity of the amplifier. Sometimes a 1.5V battery is good, sometimes is too much. Make sure the cone moves forwards when giving an impulse from the DC source).
3. With the wire in place, listen to a good favorite familiar recording. It should have harmonically rich stuff, like vocals and classical instruments. Make sure you're in a mood for listening and there are no irritants around.
Is is best to listen to small tracks no longer than a minute. Personally I'm comfortable with 20 seconds.
4. Do some swaps and compare the differences.
a) in one direction, you have a soundstage feeling from a mono source, you get depth, you get more PRaT and the whole image is coherent.
b) in the other direction, the soundstage feeling decreases considerably, you lack depth and the sounds come from the cone, you lack PRaT and coherency and the whole sounds are "fighting" each other, instead of making a harmony.
5. a) is the correct direction. Mark direction of the cable. It goes from the amplifier to the speaker, +,- wise.
Congratulations if you can hear the wire's direction. From this moment, it will be a good idea to mark every spool of your cables for future DIY projects.
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Topic - Finding the direction of a wire by ear. - aknaydenov 23:30:28 09/22/15 (6)
- RE: Hat's off to you, mate! :-)) That seems to me to need a *very* good ear to be able to do that. nt - andyr 01:49:46 10/05/15 (4)
- RE: Hat's off to you, mate! :-)) That seems to me to need a *very* good ear to be able to do that. nt - danlaudionut 15:40:36 10/07/15 (0)
- RE: Hat's off to you, mate! :-)) That seems to me to need a *very* good ear to be able to do that. nt - aknaydenov 12:03:09 10/05/15 (2)
- RE: Hat's off to you, mate! :-)) That seems to me to need a *very* good ear to be able to do that. nt - beautox 12:42:20 10/05/15 (1)
- RE: Hat's off to you, mate! :-)) That seems to me to need a *very* good ear to be able to do that. nt - aknaydenov 12:47:27 10/05/15 (0)
- RE: Finding the direction of a wire by ear. - PingPing 00:33:57 09/23/15 (0)