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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: 12 gage solid core for speakers. posted by user510 on November 16, 2006 at 20:08:45:
Move that cable down to your low frequency section. For the top end, pick up some 18 or 20 gauge solid core and twist that. Keep the two sets of cables as close to the same length as you can, but still spaced apart a bit. This should give you more of what you're looking for without spending much more money.
As previously mentioned, you need to try and keep the conductors evenly twisted and tightly wound around each other. This will give you a more consistent impedance. My guess is that this cabling as it is comes in at about 100 ohms or so. This is still high, but better than MANY other very expensive speaker cables. It is also far more resistant to RFI / EMI induced distortions.Due to all of the twisting that you've done, you will have to run this cabling for a while before it begins to settle in. I would highly recommend the use of the Ayre Acoustics "Irrational But Efficacious" disc to help things out. Put this disc on repeat at a low to medium level and let it go for as long as possible. I especially like track 7 for this purpose, but use CAUTION !!!
While this might surprise most folks, many "audiophile approved" speaker cables are in the 80 - 500 ohm range !!! It also explains why many can't hear that much of a difference between one brand of cable to the next. That is, they all suck equally when it comes to power transfer, transient response and bandwidth !!!
So long as your amp has balls and is relatively load stable, the lower the speaker cable impedance, the better off you'll be. There are a LOT of variables here though, so don't think that the nominal impedance of the cable is the most important aspect. It is but one of a LOT of different spec's. If such were not the case, i wouldn't bother suggesting to try the dual twisted pair arrangement that i did here, as the nominal impedance that the amplifier sees will still remain consistent at about 100 ohms either way.
Depending on the design, most "star quad" type cables will get you down around 35-65 ohms. Bare in mind that these can use either stranded or solid wiring. Stranding typically introduces high frequency smearing whereas a solid cable may introduce microphonics due to the rigidity involved.
Multi-conductor braided designs can net you anywhere between 15-75 ohms or so, but most all of these are stranded designs. Flexible and less microphonic, but hard to achieve an equal length path for all of the conductors involved.
Then you have some Litz wire designs, which try to achieve the best of both of these. Using various gauges of solid core wiring, they strive to achieve the lower nominal impedance potentials of the braided designs by using a more complex multi conductor "staggered conductor" geometry. Main problem here is that you end up with GOBS of dielectric due to all of the individually insulated conductors, which doesn't help things in the long run.
When you're all done experimenting with home-brew DIY cabling and the far more expensive "audiophile approved" cables out there, spend a reasonable amount of money for some Goertz MI-2 Veracity's with their silver spade bi-wire configuration. Minimal skin effect due to flat conductors, minimal inductance due to the stacked conductor geometry, 10 gauge for minimal series resistance, solid core for no strand jumping, one conductor per polarity for a consistent length signal pass, minimal amount of teflon dielectric, very low nominal impedance ( less than 10 ohms ) for better power transfer / transient response, very wide bandwidth, etc... Install their "impedance compensation networks" and be done with it. If you don't like the sound of your system with these specific Goertz speaker cables in it, it's a problem with your system and / or a matter of personal preference. it is not a cable based problem. Sean
>PS... This was re-submitted as there were a few errors in the impedances quoted and i changed some of the wording. The general content of the post remained the same.
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- Speaker cable design - Sean 10:35:08 12/01/06 (0)
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