Apart from the damping problem which has been very well laid out by Fons, there is another factor
which can come into play and which I documented in an article in Hi-Fi for Pleasure many years ago.
The fact is that many poorly constructed cables, when hit with a bit of power, will actually produce
sound themselves. Those of us who are ancient, like me, will remember that in the days before
printed circuit board construction - so things were point-to-point wired - oscilloscopes (in
particular but not exclusively), were very prone to this and would often "sing" quite happily when
hit with an audio signal. So, when I first heard the sound from the cables I though it was the scope
I was using and it took me a while to realise it wasn't. The produced sound suffers from extreme
variations in frequency response and is very 'hysteric', in that there is often a level below which
it doesn't happen at all and over which it suddenly starts to sing. It's to long ago to quote
figures, the experimental approach I used was not terrible rigorous and the whole subject needs
(properly) reinvestigating but it's still something to be aware of. Fortunately, as Fons says,
decent mains cable would be fine - at least it was then. The one I really liked when I was testing
speaker cables was ordinary flat ribbon cable with alternate conductors paralleled up. Low
resistance, low inductance, didn't produce its own noises and fitted nicely under carpets (or you
could use the colour coded variety and use it as a feature in the room - not sure if it would
necessarily improve the SAF, though :-)
Dave
On 27/07/2011 05:57, Bill de Garis wrote:
On 26/07/11 3:41 p.m., Sampo Syreeni wrote:
On 2011-07-26, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
I certainly don't want you to waste your money on fancy speaker cables.
Never thought otherwise. That's obviously never been what we do here. ;)
But resistance does matter, so a good cross section such as 2.5 mm^2 puts you
on the
safe side.
What I was trying to ask is, what's the real problem with resistance,
especially with
regard to a passive speaker and a modern, A/B class solid state end stage? I
mean, I
don't really see cable resistance shifting their operating point much, even with
feedback, within the audible range.
What is it that I'm missing?
I swapped out some lamp cable on the speakers of a stereo setup some years back with some cheap
stranded speaker cable I bought at Costco. Each core of the cable was about 3 times the cross
sectional area of the lamp cord (each core of the speaker cable was about 3/16" in dia). The
distances were not great, 5 or 6 feet.
The improvement in stereo imaging was huge.
Previously the image had wandered around between the speakers seemingly at random, now it was rock
solid at the point wherever it was when I recorded it.
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