Cable lengths


I am a novice, yet must ask the question to budget my future upgrades if possible. I need 15ft speaker cable lengths to one electrostatic speaker and the other only a few feet. Can
I use differant length cables without damaging the sound quality.
electrostaticman
Actually the propagation speed for the average cable is probably about two-thirds the speed of light.

Velocity (m/s) = Sqare root (1 / (Li*Ci)). Li = linear inductance of cable (H/m) and Ci = linear capacitance of cable (F/m).
There are no absolutely newtral cables. The active resistance plays the smallest role especially in the wires of 10AWG or thicker. The reactance will play more important role(especially inductance). If your amp is high current and can take high capacity loads than you will not experience any audiable differences.
Inductance, iirc, is related (for a "normal" wire) to the diameter of the conductor. The capacitance of the cable is related to the distance between conductors.

By normal wire, I mean one that is not a spiral like the old Krell/Symo stuff for example...

Some mfrs do things to add capacitance (shunt capacitance) via the relationship between the wires so as to offset the self inductance of the cable. Dunlavy's patents might make for good reading on this sort of idea.

Personally, I'm against this sort of idea since it rarely seems to yield a cable that sounds good to my ears. What seems to happen is that the capacitance wrecks havoc with the output waveform of feedback amps. For non-feedback amps (the few out there) the effect is different. So, IMHO, these sorts of cables never sound alike on two different amps or speakers. Unpredictable.

I try to minimize the inherent inductance and capacitance effects and feel that results in the most predictable and stable cables.

And again, the internal geometry of any cable will play the major role in its sound, the wire, materials, and the like being more secondary or even less important. That's not to say that you can not hear any of these effects when comparing identically built cables with one item changed, you often can.

So, the idea is that if you use two different lengths, usually the basic L & C values will be different enough to cause some differential in what you may hear. So, go for two
identical lengths, and DON'T COIL the excess cable!

(it makes an inductor) :- )

_-_-bear