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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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Cable Asylum Interconnects, speaker wire, power cords. Ask the Cable Guys. |
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In Reply to: I would have, but posted by PEB on August 5, 1999 at 19:40:21:
The thing is, the so called ground is just a another name for the reference point of a circuit. It is not majical, it is not special or in herently an immovable voltage point, it is just the voltage potential that the other voltages in a circuit are referenced too. The fact that the 'ground' of different components can be at different potentials is what gives rise to ground loops, and all the ills associated with connecting the various grounds of audio components together.A speaker cable carries the same currents in each leg, no matter whether it is called a 'ground' leg or a 'hot' leg. This must be so, as the current/audio signal must traverse both legs to reach the speaker terminals. A little item called Kirchoff's law says this is so, and it is about as fundamental as Ohm's Law, and as inarguable.
Any change in the inductance of the ground leg will add to the total cable loop inductance, so if it is made to be a large zipcord type of run, with the emphasis on low DCR and little attention paid to inductance or other cabel quality factors, then the inductance of the speaker cable as a whole will suffer, as will the overall quality. This extra inductance, would probably make a bright system sound smoother, and more listenable, an easy way to fool yourself into thinking that it is subjectively better.
The far end of a speaker cable's 'ground' leg is NOT held precisely to the same potential as the amp's ground output terminal, as the cables LCR parameters will prevent that from occuring. The connection here must be just as low inductance as the 'hot' leg, otherwise, the ground reference at the speaker cable will not be the same as the ground reference at the power amp. ANY differences from the amp end to the speaker end will manfest due to the cables inductance, DCR, and the capacitance of the ground leg run. If it has a poor dielectric, it will cause the sound to become smeared just as much as the so-called hot leg would for the same reason. If it is prone to motor/generator action, due to being very loosely bound to the opposite polarity, then it will cause the blurring and fuzzing that this leads too, just as muchas the so-called 'hot' leg will.
If you look at ALL of the designs for retail cables, they all try to acheive a balance and symmetry for the two polarites of the cable conductor's in terms of the electric and magnetic fields, via a symmetrical geometry. Very few try to treat the two polarities as anything but the same thing electrically, and for very good reason.
Even interconnects, with as little current as they handle, and being more sensitive to electrical than magnetic factors, still sound better when a balanced electrical construction is used, even for so-called unbalanced interconnects. You can still balance the EM fields in an interconnect, despite the signal being arbitrarily referenced to 'ground' at both ends. Twisted pairs do this, and coaxes do not.
I have personally experimented with a wide array of cable connections and hook-ups, including asymmetrical legs, and have never found such approaches to be very useful. The approach can make for an interesting, and at times, powerfull tone control, but it is NOT the most linear way to do a cable.
As for crossover components being placed in the positive leg or the negative leg of a speaker systems driver, since the main thing is that the various series components remain in series, and the shunt components remain a shunt, then the placement is essentially symmetrical, and it will not matter which leg the components are in. Same reasons as the speaker cables: Kirchoff's Law, all the current flowing through the positive leg MUST flow through the negative leg, period.
Jon Risch
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- Re: I would have, but - Jon Risch 21:57:47 08/10/99 (0)
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