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speaker cable lengths vs speaker impedance

You will find that you loose resolution, the longer you make your speaker cables. However, speaker cables are a lot more critical with lower impedances.

The difference between 4 feet and 6 inches is quite noticeable, depending in no small degree upon the output impedance of the amplifier. That is to say, amplifiers with a lower output impedance will allow for slightly longer speaker cables. However, 8 to 12 feet is overly long for 4 ohm speakers, regardless of the amp or cable.

That length can work OK for 16 ohms though. Even with 8 ohms, going over 6 feet will degrade the detail and bass impact. This is an advantage of monoblock amplifiers, as they allow for much shorter speaker cable lengths.

Things can be helped by larger conductors, greater purity and attention to cable geometry to keep the characteristic impedance of the cable down, but even given these parameters, my comments above regarding lengths still hold true.

Robert Fulton, who created the high end cable industry back in the 1970s, used to say that there was an ideal length for a cable, and sold a lot of 28 foot cables with that argument. It turns out that the ideal length thing was just a means to sell more wire- it really is to your advantage to keep the cables short!

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