If a speaker cable added 1 - 2 ohms of resistance would that be?

@nonoise 

I went to their website because the construction looked really interesting. It piqued my curiosity. When I read their marketing information, things were not adding up for me. My background is solid state physics and material sciences for semiconductors and batteries so I live this stuff (materials, not cables). It did not take long to narrow it down to what the base properties must be, what the likely material was, and important, that the material would be high resistance. That resistance is missing from the marketing material.

Of course, @crustycoot is correct that a couple of ohms of speaker-cable resistance will degrade the realized damping factor considerably. The nominal damping factor is usually computed

DF = 8 / Z

where 8 is the assumed impedance of the loudspeaker, and Z the output impedance of the amplifier.

So you would achieve a nominal damping factor of 200 (not out of the ballpark for a SS amp) with the output impedance of the amp being 0.04 ohms. If you add 10 feet of Belden 5T00UP, you’d add another 0.01 ohms, and the effective DF would be 160. If you added 2 ohms of cable resistance, the effective DF would be about 4.

Some prefer an underdamped sound.

P.S. I am prone to typos and simple math errors, so if I’ve made any, please point them out and correct them.

You really need to make a 4 wire measurenent to accurateley measure resistance especially at this low value.  And as I understand the Inductance of the wire makes more diff than the resistance...

@pmerendino,

If these are 1-2 ohms, a standard good quality meter should get you close enough. Not perfect, but close enough.

For inductance, back of envelope assuming 2 inch average spacing would be 400nH/foot. At 6" that is 1.1uH / foot. That's just first order equations. I could simulate it in FEA but hardly seems worth it. If my math is right that’s about 0.7 ohms impedance but at 20KHz and I have not been able to hear there for a long time. Back to my stereophile phase and impedance charts, the impact would depend on the speaker. It does not seem like a good design to allow the inductance to be so variable.

If these are 1-2 ohms, a standard good quality meter should get you close enough. Not perfect, but close enough.

No, you really need to make a four-wire measurement.  1 or 2 ohm is too much for a 8ft cable.