Cable lengths

Okay... so what is worse, coiling one speaker cable or having one side shorter?

Before we move on to deciding which is worse, coiling one side or having one side shorter, I want to mention one more thing about the data. I made a mistake with my percentage calculations. For instance, notice at 10 kHz, the "effective resistance" increased from 49.47m to 80.14m. That is actually about a 62% increase instead of the 38% that I listed. At 300 kHz the jump from 255m to 505m is about a 98% increase !!! This series of measurements is interesting because it points out that side-by-side speaker wire is generally not that great. It is not as linear over the listening range as we would like. All of our other equipment costs alot of money and is linear. So why would we think that spending more money for speaker cables is a waste? How much more to spend is the question. Hey, if anybody has cables they want measured, send them to me. It will give us some data points for comparison.

Thank you all: I am convienced, the purchase of even length speaker cable is well worth the money when optimizing our systems. A special thanks to Bufus for takeing what we suspect and coming up with just facts.

Well, Bufus is not telling you the whole story.

What he did say is essentially correct though!

The fact is that the resitance of the cable is in the milliohms, and that a double (100%) increase in resistance is really rather small. So, it's not the resistance that you have to worry about too much.

IF there is anything to worry about it is the reactance and the effect that it will have on how your amp sees the load. In some cases (highly capacitive speaker cables come to mind) I'd actually want some series inductance with certain loads.

But, for optimizing a system, I'd have to say keep both sides the same as much as is practical.

And, coiling *one side* of a speaker cable is likely to not be as good as not coiling one side...

In case you are unsure about what the effect of "out of band" reactance is on a typical amp, try measuring a square wave with a capacitive load on it! It usually doesn't look very pretty - and doesn't usually sound so pretty either.

_-_-bear