Speaker cable Question?

>>The primary source of the 8 ft. minimum speaker cable length wisdom, is Pierre Sprey with Mapleshade.<<

I've spoken with 3 manufacturers today regarding this issue and all of them consider the 8' minimum position hogwash. These are folks that own, engineer, and build cables for their livelihood. I tend to believe them.

Personally, I've never heard longer speaker cables sound better in any of my systems.

Just to clarify my post, my experience does not coincide with Mr. Sprey's recommendation. My speaker cables are 6 feet long and sound just fine. There are lots of folks happily using 4 ft. speaker cables with monoblock amps.

"Dielectric, capacitance and inductance are important properties in cable design. These electrical properties must be kept as low as possible, therefore permitting a very wide frequency bandwidth and fast electronic flow."
-Robert Lee, Acoustic Zen

One way to help keep capacitance, inductance, resistance and dielectric as low as possible would be to use short cables. I can't remember reading any technical reasoning for the 8 ft. minimum length and would be very interested to hear some of the EE folks chime in.

I knew what you meant, Mitch. I've also heard that position from Mapleshade before. I'm also an EE, but to be honest the last people I would ask about cables are those from the electrical engineering community. All you get is a regirgitation of math equations we learned to model the electrical properties of stuff. Funny thing is none of those terms account for what we hear in the end. That's not to say there is no importance to the theory, but in my experience it does depend on system components and which cables one tries. Synergy is the most important term and that can only be measured by listening.

So have fun and experiment with as many cables as you can get your hands on.

Dan

Well, I am an EE also, but tend to use simple logic before delving into any analysis.
Logic says active speakers must use cable lengths of less than a foot, and I never heard of any drawbacks.

Perhaps the 8 ft reference simply evolved from the average distance people tend to place speakers apart, allowing for plenty of slack so as not to strain the terminals at either end. Just my theory anyway...

You can't make a short cable longer, but if a cable is a little too long, it's easy enough to hide the excess, or have the cable shortened.
From my limited conversations with a speaker cable manufacturer, I've been advised the shorter the better, as this reduces capacitance, resistance & interference.

Then again, I recently shortened my cables by 3 feet with no discernable change to the sound, so who knows?...