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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.
Follow Ups:
.
I think it has more to do
with training your ears.
I once heard a terrible speaker
which had very bad phasing problems.
After that I found I heard
phasing problems much easier.
I then had to replace my car speakers because
the comparatively small phasing problem was
far too obvious now but I was fine before.
This has happened several times
with different "problems".
Cone break-up,response spikes, poor drive
and boomy bass to name a few.
IMO Golden Ear people aren't born that way,
they learn it from the systems that don't ...
Fill in the BLANK.
DanL
I believe it needs a very good system. I've come to the conclusion that non-audiophile listeners men and women easily guess the wire direction.
The technique I use is slightly different:
- I use two pieces of wire, wired into a line level interconnect. Of course you have to ensure that the wire is the same direction on both channels
-- I use a stereo recording, but one that has a nicely focussed center image of a singer.
-- When the wire is the right way around, the image is more focussed with the image appearing dead-center
-- When the wire is the wrong way around, the image is more diffuse and wanders around.
I found that once I knew what I was listening for, it's pretty easy to hear.
beatox,
Your method works well too, although mine is a bit lazier and nice for quicker tests. What are the most apparent differences from wrong/right cable direction IMHO:
-soundstage
-coherency
-PRaT, musical feeling.
very interesting :)
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