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Post by ChrisB on Jan 20, 2016 14:07:05 GMT
A certain breed of hi-fi folk obsess about speaker cables and it seems that the received wisdom is the thicker the better. I've seen cables as thick as my forearm hooked up to speakers at shows that must be all but pulling the terminal plate off the back of the cabinet. I won't bother to mention all the bling and ironmongery that some cables come with.
Follow the speaker cables though, going into the cabinet and we find we're usually connecting those painstakingly selected aftermarket cables up to something rather more mundane between the cabinet terminals and the driver connectors. OK, so some people - the dedicated few - change that for something more to their taste.
Go beyond this wire though, and we get to the voice coils, which are, of course made of wire! A quick spell on Google and I find that the average voice coil wire is between 0.15 and 0.20 mm in diameter and there are many, many metres of it. This is really different from what's going between the amp and speaker terminals and just very different from the internal hook-up wire!
So, apart from the obvious practical considerations, why aren't we using voice coils wire in the rest of the system?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2016 18:05:04 GMT
I could be talking absolute bollocks but doesn't a coil work differently to a length of wire? As for internal wiring, I've ALWAYS had good results by changing it to something better,
Interesting topic though, and it's set me thinking again.
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Post by MikeMusic on Jan 20, 2016 18:08:04 GMT
Hifi just isn't a fully developed industry.
This is why we keep discovering things that have always been there
Maybe the key is to delve deep and DIY
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2016 18:12:36 GMT
In a fairly famous blind-testing, a coat-hanger was indistinguishable from fancy speaker wire. I don't agree that the received wisdom, or even the consensus, is that "the thicker the better". Do you have any evidence for this?
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2016 18:22:34 GMT
One of the best internal wires I've tried was Cyrus sold core. Another good one was Supra 4. Both very different approaches (and thicknesses) but both good.
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Post by ChrisB on Jan 20, 2016 18:23:50 GMT
Lawrence,
Perhaps I exaggerated a little, but I think there is a certain amount of that thinking. However, there was a thread here just a short while ago that tested exactly that premise. It proved on experimentation that the 'wisdom' was not particularly wise.
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Post by ChrisB on Jan 20, 2016 18:30:10 GMT
I could be talking absolute bollocks but doesn't a coil work differently to a length of wire? I thought about that too, but it's still part of the circuit which then returns via the same changes in wire gauge and don't forget that there are tails to the coil which must purely act as 'wire' rather than as part of a motor system. Me too! |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 20, 2016 18:30:52 GMT
Lawrence, Perhaps I exaggerated a little, but I think there is a certain amount of that thinking. However, there was a thread here just a short while ago that tested exactly that premise. It proved on experimentation that the 'wisdom' was not particularly wise. Indeed, although I think "prove" is maybe a little strong. Your original question is a good one, and it is probably unanswerable. It's a bit like the fancy mains leads that people buy to replace the kettle lead between the socket and equipment. What about the miles of wire between the socket and the local transformer and between the local transformer and the power station? Non blind-test listening is not a good way to judge IMHO. How could people possibly know that the placebo effect isn't influencing their judgement without a proper blind test? |
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Post by Sovereign on Jan 20, 2016 20:07:39 GMT
This is really different from what's going between the amp and speaker terminals and just very different from the internal hook-up wire! So, apart from the obvious practical considerations, why aren't we using voice coils wire in the rest of the system? Your kind of correct, if you can be bothered and have the skills; I would do away with the speaker terminals altogether and internal speaker wire and have your speaker wire going through the back of the speaker cabinet straight to the xover. That is what I have done with my DIY open Baffles. I applied the same approach to my hifi mains. Why fuss around with aftermarket mains cables then plug them into a shite house ring main, I installed a dedicated radial connecting my hifi directly to the incoming tails to the house. NB. All safety measures were taken and I have a full NIC EIC ten page sign off document for this. |
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Post by MartinT on Jan 21, 2016 19:41:01 GMT
Lawrence just beat me to it: it's exactly like all the other arguments about the miles of ordinary cable and the short mains power lead at the end.
It's about cumulative effect, for sure. But I think the more I play with cables the more I find it's about RFI/EFI filtering prowess and that's about braiding/shape/materials creating the inductance and capacitance characteristics of the cable. Thicker has certainly not proven better as long as the cable is not stupidly thin.
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Post by dsjr on Jan 21, 2016 22:11:34 GMT
My understanding is that the amplifier output impedance is also very critical to the correct performance of these things, the lower the better (and higher the damping factor as a result). Crown, back in the early 70's, actually prepared charts in their manuals suggesting a suitable gauge of speaker wire for various lengths and average speaker impedances. I'll try and scan it and post it.
Having said the above, I've always had a dislike for mega-stranded speaker cables, the ones with hundreds of very fine strands. Solid core is fine in VERY short runs, but inline resistance climbs quickly over 3m each run. At KJ in the late 90's, we had some finger-thick (per each conductor) black stranded copper cables and these were incredible.
One danger with self-filtering speaker cables is that they can present a horrible load to an amplifier. Woven Litz types (featuring high capacitance iirc) causing blow-ups in some cases, and ringing in all the others I seem to recall (look at the thousands of amp tests into capacitive loads and see how the amps 'ring').
P.S. Coat-hanger wire seems a very good compromise, but very difficult to form......
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Post by MartinT on Jan 22, 2016 8:46:21 GMT
Wasn't it Monitor Audio (?) braided litz cable that caused Naims to have a meltdown due to the lack of a Zobel stability network in their circuit?
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Post by tony on Jan 22, 2016 8:59:57 GMT
When I ordered my Frugels from Steve he gave me the option of wiring direct to the drivers as I was close coupling the amps. I then experimented with a number of different speaker wires from basic stuff to pretty exotic, due only needing jumper lengths. Each wire had its own sonic signature, some more to my taste than others.
It probably boiled down to the wires being tone controls in my system-depends on how you like your distortion?
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Post by Sovereign on Jan 22, 2016 9:29:51 GMT
When I ordered my Frugels from Steve he gave me the option of wiring direct to the drivers as I was close coupling the amps. I then experimented with a number of different speaker wires from basic stuff to pretty exotic, due only needing jumper lengths. Each wire had its own sonic signature, some more to my taste than others. It probably boiled down to the wires being tone controls in my system-depends on how you like your distortion? That's the only problem with directly wiring your amp to your speaker xover or drivers, if you are the kind of person who may experiment with speaker wire in the near future, it can make speaker cable swapping a bit of a faf. |
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Post by dsjr on Jan 22, 2016 12:03:10 GMT
Wasn't it Monitor Audio (?) braided litz cable that caused Naims to have a meltdown due to the lack of a Zobel stability network in their circuit? Yes it was - and it wasn't just Naims that got hot and ringy with it either.... I think Goetz is the nearest electrical equivalent apparently in terms of capacitance per foot.
You know, nowt wrong with RS Components 56 strand. Just don't twist it heavily like we did!
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Post by ChrisB on Jan 22, 2016 13:24:59 GMT
That was the same as the stuff that was Polk branded in the U.S. it came from Japan and had a sleeving that gave off fumes that could cause permanent damage to you if you melted it!
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