50' speaker or 50' interconnect?

I would have tended to run the speaker wires longer for fear that longer runs of low level signal wires are more subject to noise and interference from external sources. I guess not so much if shielded.

And especially not so much if balanced! And that applies whether or not the components are "fully" (internally) balanced or not, as long as the balanced driver and receiver stages are well designed.

I have speakers up to about 15-20 yards or so away as the crow flies connected via standard guage commercial in-wall speaker wire to my system and I do not hear any ill effects compared to the pair sitting just a few feet away and connected via higher end 12' Audioquest cv6 wires, so running longer lengths of speaker wire is not something I fear based on experience.

In addition to the cables themselves, speaker impedance (the higher the better), the variations of speaker impedance with frequency (the less variation the better, especially at high frequencies), amplifier damping factor, and the criticality of amplifier damping factor to the particular speaker, are all variables that will significantly affect whether or not very long speaker cables will be acceptable.

Best regards,
-- Al

Al, good points.

Cheers!

I'm running about 30 feet of phoenix gold balanced cable between my phono stage and pre-amp. I'm very happy with it and price was about $75 (if memory serves). If I was dealing with your issue I'd give them a call.

Based on cables alone, the 50' balanced interconnect is superior to the 50' speaker cable. In the case of long cable runs attenuation and noise injection are the big concerns.

Of the two problems, noise is the most problematic for interconnects. The fundamental design of the XLR circuit is based on transmitting two identical but inverted polarity signals on a pair of conductors. At the receiving end, any signal that is not on the opposite polarity conductor is considered noise and is rejected which leaves only the signal originally transmitted through the cable. Active circuits at both ends of the signal path (cable) helps alleviate the attenuation issue.

Noise is not a significant issue with speaker cable because of signal strength. It's really hard to inject enough noise on a speaker cable to create noise on the speaker end. However, attenuation can have a very noticeable affect on the quality of sound from the speaker. As the signal is affected by the attenuation (capacitance, inductance, resistance) of the conductor, the sound from the speaker is changed. Your mileage may vary on the degree of the change but speaker cables beyond 8 to 12 feet will increasingly influence the sound coming from your speakers.

Obviously it is more complicated than that but, without knowing any thing else about your system and environment, the cable question is pretty straight forward.