Cable "burning": Real or VooDoo ???

Steve, mostly all of the mid to late 70s high power SS superamps used tons of negative feedback. Whatever benefits derived from excessive amounts of it,were all negated by the God awful sonic results. The spec sheets were always the same; i.e. incredibly low static distortion figures at very high power...damping factors up in the hundreds!!! and low slew rates (remember when slew rates were the most important specs?). The tank amplifier that Sean was referring to, was, for sure, the Mark Levinson ML-2. There was simply no better made SS amp in that era.

Steve, your example takes things to an extreme. How much "small gauge" wire would you have to run to increase the line loss to the level that you mentioned ??? I took and measured appr 20' of 21 gauge wire. This would be equivalent to a 10' run of cable to and from the speaker. Series resistance was less than 0.3 ohm. While a smaller wire would be higher in resistance and a longer run would also contribute to this, it would take a LOT of wire to produce even just a FEW ohms of resistive loss.

Even with that in mind, i'm NOT discounting your theory that various speaker cables DO alter the load that the amp sees. As such, the amp CAN respond differently to specific impedance combinations that it is presented with due to different speaker / speaker cables / cable lengths required in various installations. As such, you have only helped me to prove that wires CAN sound different and ARE completely system dependent due to the stability of the circuit driving it.

THANKS for the help in clarifying this situation, as i never knew you had it in ya..... : ) Sean
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Sean - I used the 8 ohms just to make the example easier to think about. I'm not sure but a damping factor of one may be similar to the results with an 8 ohm resistor. You won't get any naysaying from me about phenomena that can alter the frequency response.

How is it then that i remember you as being one of the "wire is wire" crowd ? Am i mistaken ? Sean
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Sean - I believe our ears are very sensitive to changes in frequency response. If something can be shown to effect frequency response it is a valid subject, as, of course, are many others. What I don't believe that many audiogoners do, is that there is something intrinsic in the molecular structure of the metal itself that alters the sound. It's that "silver has a laid back sound" kind of talk that drives me nuts. (People seem to not undertand that it is an electrical and not a sound signal traveling the wire). Since cable manufactures have no explanations for why one cable sounds better than another, they promote psuedo scientific explanations. I have an email from a manufacturer with just this kind of nonsense in it.

While I am ranting, let me tell you a an experience I am having with my new B&W Nautilus speakers. I hooked them up and got ready for something wonderful to happen. They sounded so bad to me I thought, hmmmm I must have gotten them out of phase. Wouldn't be the first time. I checked. Nope not out of phase. So I listened for a while and well the accuracy seemed very good. I listen for a few days and they sounded better but I'm still troubled. So I check the phase with a battery. Yep, they are in phase, at least the woofers. It's a couple of weeks now and they seem to have some bass now, it seemed totally absent at first. They are used speakers so "burn in" isn't involved.

Have I discovered a new phenomenon?... Speakers have to get used to their new suroundings before they begin to sound OK.... Or is it perhaps that the complicated, imperfect blob of protoplasm that I am is changing and the speakers are performing exactly the same as they did when first connected.