Speaker cable vs. interconnect cable length

Icsi, I too am in the short-speaker, long-interconnect camp. My $285/foot AQ speakercable is 4 feet long. My interconnects are longer. But then the cable to the surround speakers is about 30 feet long.

However there are some audiofiles/fools (I'm in the latter group), including the owner of Mapleshade Records, who believe there's some magic MINIMUM length for speakercable. Mr. 'Mapleshade' (I still can't find his name after looking at 4 pages on his site) believes that speakercable should never be shorter than 8 feet. I'm sure he's smarter and absolutely more experienced at these things than I, so I neither agree nor disagree with that, I just ignore it. I recall hearing this '8-foot rule' decades earlier, too, but I have no recollection where.

With "Apologies to those for whom worrying is the whole point", to quote Pabelson*, I absolutely do NOT worry about different speakercable lengths, I just make 'em as short as they need to be to reach the 2 speakers. After all, if you believe that cable is evil (= audible) and hence should be using as little as possible, why make both channels equally bad? There's nothing wrong with having one channel a little-less-bad than the other.

* WELL said, my friend; I love it!
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Think about the length of line level signal cables used between microphones and recording equipment. Fifty feet or more. Obviously not a problem unless you have lousy wire or high impedance outputs.

Besides, having long interconnects qualifies you to argue about Balanced/Unbalanced.

Thanks everyone for your advice. It looks like short speaker cables (4' to 8' in length) and long interconnects (18' to 25' in length) is the concensus here. I hope the sound is not affected by the long interconnect length. FYI, I will be running interconnects to three monoblock amps for the L/C/R front speakers.

I recently went through this same debate, and went with 40' balanced interconnects. I was nervous when I fired it up, as I had a fair amount of time in running the wire and terminating the ends. The good news is that it sounds great, not noticeably different than 3' interconnects.

- Eric

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Icsi,
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If you are going to go with long IC's, you should get balanced interconnects.
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