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In Reply to: Wrong: IC should be shortest possible, not speaker cables. (nt) posted by cheap-Jack on November 20, 2006 at 12:52:01:
eeer............. nothe small signal and relatively large conductor in IC will give a better transmittion than a big signal in a small conductor in the speaker cable .
Thats why you try to get your mono block amps as close to your speakers as you can. Why do the fit amps in speakers ?? there'd be no point if you proposition was true.
Follow Ups:
Hi.ICs (conductor size are normally from #30 to 20#) are smaller than
speaker cables (conductor size normally from#16 to #10).Of course, size is not the key issue, its the length of the ICs or speaker cables, where the condudctor capacitance, & inductance, which affect the sound most, kick in.
So your statemenet is wrong. It should be written like this: small signal runs in small conductor in short IC will give a better
transmission than a big signal in a big conductor in the speaker cable.
It is the capacitance of long ICs that matters ... inductance is not really a factor due to the low currents involved. Neither is R ... viz. the VdH carbon ICs which have a high resistance, relative to copper or silver wires.OTOH, with speaker cables it's low inductance which is the key - because of the high currents involved. High capacitance doesn't influence the sound ... but it might send your amps into terminal oscillation!! :-))
Regards,
active speakers are the work of the devil and passive is the one true path!! :-))I'm with you BTW, zanash ... I run my Maggies 3-way active; 35' ICs and 4' speaker cables.
Regards,
Hi.and shorten the ICs to shortest lengths possible, I bet you dollar for dollar you'll find it sounds much much better.
I had done this for my audiophile friend in similar situation whereby
he ran a 20ft IC from his phonostage & linestage seated next to where he sat to his two monoblocks located next to the loudspeakers, some 15ft apart.He spent big bucks for Goertz twisted flat-ribbon copper ICs, no shield, but so what? The inter-conductor capacitance alone on this long run, even without shielding, is big enough to make the sound dull & lack of life. Once I relocted the phonostage & linestage next to the power amps, & replaced the long long flat ribbon ICs with short 4N silver ICs, life, air & dynamcis came right back.
FYI, not many pre-amps can handle long ICs. So don't expect your premap can as well.
Unless using a transmission line system in btween the premap & power amps in question as I did it for a HiFi concerts in concert halls in the past, long run ICs are not recommended.
c-J
but switched to long ICs. Because of the layout of my room I have to choose between one and the other! :-((My tube-output preamp can certainly cope with these ICs.
As you say, capacitance is a killer for long ICs (long speaker cables as well, in fact) so I took care to make up a low-capacitance IC. I also went to a great deal of effort to space the shield well away from the signal wires. No "dull & lifeless" here, mate!! :-))
Regards,
Hi.FYI, the IC connecting my LP turntable to my tube phono+linestage is only 1-ft long, which I custom-built with 4N silver conductors.
For the best sound, we got to spend sometime in our equipment arrangement to get the best sound via shortest cabling.
For the same reason, I custom design-built my audio rack to provide the phono+linestage the centre position of the rack so that the signal cables from/to other equipment can be kept shortest runs.
My turntable is placed immediately next to the equipment rack on a separate 150lb concrete block base support, in the same horizonal plane of the phono-preamp so that the crucial TT to pre-amp IC can be kept shortest as said above.
For best sound possible, don't take anything for granted.
Hi.It is a compromise technically & sonically.
when I owned Naim amps, evidently they needed a 6' or 8' length of pseaker cable to provide them with just the right amount of inductive loading!!?? They sounded worse with really short speaker cables.Regards,
Hi.When I said "short" speaker cables, I mean not over 12ft, equal length for EACH stereo channel.
I used to run some 15ft speaker cable each channel. But when I reduced the cable to about 10ft after I design-built a new audio rack for my gears, as explained earlier, I found it helps make sound better, among other upgrades, e.g. power line filter, etc. etc.
Yes, some, though not many, amps are designed with a dummy load incorporating a certain capacitance+inductance+resistive network to make way for the amp to work 'comfortably' with most commercial brandname speakers. But I am surprised your amp would be getting so
'sensitive' to really short speaker cables.There could be other pre-existing conditions in your system that could your amp getting so sensitive to too short speaker cable length.
If long ICs were a fatal flaw, recording studios would have a real problem making recordings. Think of all the situations where microphone cables and preamp cables run all over the place before they get to the recording device.The point is to have the proper cables for the situation in question. One can certainly use the wrong cable or have a poor match with the equipment, but those issues can be addressed if one is paying attention to the basics.
As with most things in a home system, the person needs to experiment a bit and come to his own conclusion about what works best for his situation since he is the one who has to live with his handiwork.
Hi.Recording studios run long long mic cable to the mixer consoles, all in 3-wire balanced transmission (typically 600R) format.
Any dip/hump of the audio frequency spectrum due to the long line transmission are compensated with the frequency equalizer & noise filter/limiters built in the console. There is sophiscated signal processing for the signal to go through before being recorded onto the master tape.
But in home audio, our ICs are mostly unbalanced signal transfer
& go straight to the amps. The only passive or 'helpless' way to for us consumers to handle the signal loss situation is to cut short all the signal paths. Any other way is only a compromise.c-J
> Any other way is only a compromise.Short interconnects may well be desireable for certain reasons, but they are just one of an endless set of compromises that are made in any system, whether home or pro. (I worked in professional sound reinforcement for several years, so am comfortable making that statement.)
Some people have a system arrangement in their homes that require some distance between the music source and the speakers. Long speaker cables have their own set of drawbacks. In a prior home I had a 40' run between the source and the speakers. As I recommended in a prior message, I followed my own advice and experimented. I tried the amps at the music source with short ICs and long speaker cables. Then I tried long IC's and short speaker cables. In that particular incarnation, the long IC/short speaker cable simply sounded better. So I set it up that way and ceased to worry about it further.
Sometimes it is too easy for audiophiles to become obsessed with a single factor in a less-than-ideal setting and ignore options that represent a better overall result.
Hi.If you can't come up with some technical reasoning why a long IC can sound better than a short IC, I will dismiss your comment as imaginative.
Or had there been big sonic issues already existing that you needed to mask it up with the huge capacitance+inductance of a long long IC.
Who wants to run a 40-ft long speaker cable, anyway for home audio?
PA & home audio are two different things to handle, my friend.
> why a long IC can sound better than a short ICI did not say a long IC sounds better than a short one. What I said is if one of two cables has to be long it is not a given as to which combo will yield the better results in a particular situation. That is hardly the same as saying long IC's just sound better. Speaker cables have their own issues with length and characteristics vary widely by brand. There is a vast number of potential combinations of equipment, cables and speakers that one might be dealing with.
As for the 40' run, it is interesting you can be dismissive of the system placement issues that someone you know nothing about may face. Perhaps you should change your moniker to "Karnac the Magnificent."
spot on !
But that's a special case. Those are extremely high capacitance cables.
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