If we had the luxury of the Great Symposium where we could hash these issues out with George Cardas, Bill Low Audiouest, Steve Straightwire and various astrophysicists of our choice, we could learn a lot. But in real life, we must make whatever progress we can make, learning from experience and limited knowledge and paying attention to lots of leads.
Here's a memory of such a lead. The CS5 had a huge crossover that included 2 huge bucket brigade delays in addition to 4 crossovers for the 5 drivers, which had huge magnets. Talk about a pot of soup. We used our usual solid 18 gauge tight twist in teflon. Jim always included the speaker wire runs in his calculations and tests. In other words, those wire runs add resistance, inductance and capacitance to the crossover circuits, and he included that in his design / execution work. OK. In final (4 months long!) listening tests, those crossovers came in and out lots of times. The workhorse pair used straight single wires from the XO terminals to a terminal block mounted on the side of the cabinet. Eventually the twisted driver runs were hooked directly to the XO, and there was "a sound" that couldn't be accounted for in electrical terms nor in concept engineering terms. We chose the final 9" to 12", depending on which driver, to be left untwisted. Something about how the wire-fields were interacting with the "pot of soup" made that configuration sound better. It is possible that Jim gained additional knowledge as time went on, but at that time none of us nor anything we could learn could explain much of anything about the heard phenomenon.
We may be in a similar situation with these cable runs. I ran tests on A, B and C as described above. All the tests in my kit - to see if there were changes introduced by the different configurations. I can't detect any. So far I have listened to Morrow SP-4 and Straightwire Octave II. Both exhibit similar differences. Both are sophisticated cables. I have not yet tried my ProCo (Beldenesque) HiPure 4-conductor "normal" stranded cables. What I learned from the SW, is that the 3 configurations measure as "identical". There are no measured differences that I can identify to account for the heard differences. So, whoever goes comparing, you can dismiss the potential cause of measurable frequency response changes, or impulse or phase changes. It's something else.
As an end user, Rob can choose whichever he likes better. Fair enough. As a designer, I must pursue understanding that might be applied in the internal wiring as well as fodder for this user mill's advancement.
I'll be calling Steven Hill and George Cardas to pick some brains. I'll be very interested in what Beetle reports. Any other input is also much appreciated.
Here's a memory of such a lead. The CS5 had a huge crossover that included 2 huge bucket brigade delays in addition to 4 crossovers for the 5 drivers, which had huge magnets. Talk about a pot of soup. We used our usual solid 18 gauge tight twist in teflon. Jim always included the speaker wire runs in his calculations and tests. In other words, those wire runs add resistance, inductance and capacitance to the crossover circuits, and he included that in his design / execution work. OK. In final (4 months long!) listening tests, those crossovers came in and out lots of times. The workhorse pair used straight single wires from the XO terminals to a terminal block mounted on the side of the cabinet. Eventually the twisted driver runs were hooked directly to the XO, and there was "a sound" that couldn't be accounted for in electrical terms nor in concept engineering terms. We chose the final 9" to 12", depending on which driver, to be left untwisted. Something about how the wire-fields were interacting with the "pot of soup" made that configuration sound better. It is possible that Jim gained additional knowledge as time went on, but at that time none of us nor anything we could learn could explain much of anything about the heard phenomenon.
We may be in a similar situation with these cable runs. I ran tests on A, B and C as described above. All the tests in my kit - to see if there were changes introduced by the different configurations. I can't detect any. So far I have listened to Morrow SP-4 and Straightwire Octave II. Both exhibit similar differences. Both are sophisticated cables. I have not yet tried my ProCo (Beldenesque) HiPure 4-conductor "normal" stranded cables. What I learned from the SW, is that the 3 configurations measure as "identical". There are no measured differences that I can identify to account for the heard differences. So, whoever goes comparing, you can dismiss the potential cause of measurable frequency response changes, or impulse or phase changes. It's something else.
As an end user, Rob can choose whichever he likes better. Fair enough. As a designer, I must pursue understanding that might be applied in the internal wiring as well as fodder for this user mill's advancement.
I'll be calling Steven Hill and George Cardas to pick some brains. I'll be very interested in what Beetle reports. Any other input is also much appreciated.