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Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

RE: Of course it exists, It's just irrelevant to audio

"It's irrelevant for an audio signal in a typical speaker cable"

I wouldn't take that as given. Audio is a very wide bandwidth signal and it's frequency span is just right to modulate the penetration depth dramatically through common wire guages and sheet metals. The fastest changing parameter over frequency is phase then amplitude.

This is how NDT was done for decades in the aerospace trade although now I think it's fallen out of favor and they mostly use Xrays. It's still the technology of choice for most vending machines and hobbiest metal detectors.

Many years ago I was dinking with speaker cables and bought some from audioquest. I didn't think they sounded very good. So I bought some from Kimber and they were MUCH better sounding. I figured that with anything that audible that it should be easy to measure a difference so I just did an amplitude sweep (in the actual system) of each and found that at 20KHz the Audioquest was down something like 1.3 dB and the Kimber was essentially flat.

I didn't bother to do the phase but I'm sure it would have had a greater delta and was likely the main drive of the difference since a dB isn't much subjectively. I just bought more Kimber for my other system and have been using them ever since. They were both affordable cables in those days and were similiarly priced.

OK, not high quality analysis but it's just a hobby.

Another potential factor, but one that I haven't investigated is Vib. As you of all people know speaker cabinets vibrate and cables vary widely in their longitudinal mechanical impedances. Assuming that the power amplifier is not well isolated from mechanical energy at it's output terminals then perhaps squishy cables, like the Kimber have an edge over stiff ones like the Audioquest.

What a great hobby...

Rick


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  • RE: Of course it exists, It's just irrelevant to audio - rick_m 16:51:12 03/07/15 (0)

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