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Whats wrong with short cables?

Hello Fellow Audionuts!!!!

Just curious....

Why should speaker cables be 8 feet and over? I hear that sometimes shorter cables can cause blown tweets and such during extended guitar solo's and stuff like that.

I always kinda assumed the shorter the run the better.

Im researching into building my own Pre, SS Amps, Speakers, and cables. I was planning on running a stereo amp pair for each speaker and bi-amping them. The amplifiers will be on thier own stands between the pre/cdp/tuner and the speaker. That means i will have a speaker cable run of probably less than 4 feet.

Would it be better to tailor the legnth of the cable to the distance needed? or would it be better to use a cable over 8 feet in legnth and just have it coiled behind the speaker?
slappy
sean
6,231 posts
 
Most speaker cables are deficient in design and using a longer length gives you more of a problem. By keeping poorly designed speaker cables as short as possible, you redue the effects that they have on the system. As such, the logical deduction would be that longer speaker cables = lower performance. This is true when you start off with something that is sub-standard to begin with. If one were to purchase "real" speaker cables that are correctly designed, you don't have to worry about running longer lengths with their signal degradation creeping in. Sean
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eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Subaruguru...I vote for short cables, like 1 foot with the monoblock amp adjacent ro the speaker. However, if you have too-long cables that need to be tidied up, coiling them can be OK. First of all, the air-core inductor created by coiling several feet of cable would be of very low value...especially for the woofer signal which goes directly into a large inductor of the crossover network. Furthermore, for the perfectionist, you can coil the wire in the same configuration that non-inductive wirewound resistors are made. Make a large loop of all the wire you want to coil, and then wind the coiled (2-wire) loop. tightly.
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drubin
3,274 posts
 
Sean, thanks for pointing to the AA thread. I have a set of your preferred cables sitting around, which I happened to stick in the system (between Pass 150 and Thiel 2.4) the other night. No Zoebel networks, however. Sound was disappointing, but maybe I'll give it a longer audition. --Dan
distortion
571 posts
 
I asked my Fiancee, she says "short cables" lack depth and definitely have presentation shortcomings. =) Lucky for me, I receive about 100 emails a day on how to "lengthen my cable."
jmcgrogan2's avatar
jmcgrogan2
6,346 posts
 
Distortion, not to worry, after your fiancee becomes your wife, you won't be needing that cable anymore anyway, so length becomes a non-issue.=)
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