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Speaker cable vibration?

After trial and error, I discovered that a certain 'edginess' and lack of coherence I was hearing from my speakers was due in part to the physical vibration of the speaker cable and connectors. As music was playing, I felt the connectors where they connected to the binding posts, and they had significant vibration, in direct relation to what the drivers were doing. Also, to a lesser degree but in the same vein, the speaker cable itself was also vibrating.

I then tried damping the the cable and connectors with very DIY items from Home Depot -- pipe insulation and felt washers for sinks. The result was a much tighter, smoother more natural and direct sound.

I am in the middle just now of receiving different speakers after selling off the ones I was using. I have wondered if poor binding post insulation was the culprit, and will find out more definitively once I try the new speakers and see if vibrating binding posts are still an issue.

I bring this up, because:
1) The issue seems significant in its affect on the sound
2) I haven't read/heard much about this before (I would think any significant source of vibration would have been jumped on by the tweak companies by now)
3) Why haven't speaker cable companies addressed this
4) Curious to hear from others

The sound has been improved, but looks-wise, I've got speaker cable wrapped in pipe insulation. Not very WAF to say the least. I do know of one company -- Acoustic Revive -- that I think has some sort of insulation in their connectors. FYI my speaker cables are thick Synergistic Research with WBT 0645 banana connectors.
tholt
capt369
152 posts
 
Tholt, I`ve had the ic dampers in place for the past five yrs. If memory serves, I did notice a positive difference. I will do a current a/b when my amp comes back from the shop.

Herbies does offer a full money back guarantee if his products don`t work in your system.
capt369
152 posts
 
One other thought, Have you considered re terminating w/spades? Lots of audio experts extol the sonic virtues of spades over bananas.
jedinite24's avatar
jedinite24
1,503 posts
 
Thanks for starting this thread THolt and thanks Capt369 for contributing. I'm going to look into those binding post washers from Herbies. I have a pair of KEF Q300s and when I was playing music at normal levels the speaker binding posts were vibrating a bit when I touched them. I was checking to see if some tweaks I had put in place were secure and noticed the vibration. The speaker cables were secure as were the tweaks and the binding posts were screwed in tight but I felt a lot of vibration back there. I put a 5lb weight on top of each speaker but the music sounded really funny.

I don't remember if the other bookshelves I've had in the past had that much vibration/resonance in the back or in general.
tholt OP
551 posts
 
Capt369 - spades vs bananas, is your comment directly related to the vibration issue or just in general? I am not debating your feedback, but would like to hear if spades have been said to ameliorate vibration over bananas
capt369
152 posts
 
Tholt, I was speaking in general terms. Well, plus the fact that places like Herbies don`t offer speaker cable termination dampers for bananas that I`m aware of. Bobby P. of merlin speaker fame told me years ago that spades were sonically superior to bananas. It makes sense, in that, there`s more surface to surface contact.
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