Speaker Cables, One side longer- bad idea?

Wow! Science rearing its ugly head! Such nerve. Obviously the golden eared listeners can hear such phase difference, and then some. To introduce arguments using numbers, you silly person... You have to own Bose 901s, right? By the way, to put out such utterances you have to have a scientific background, no? Come on fess up. How about something on spiking every known component, I 'spose you have numbers on that too, eh? Geez, you're no fun. You probably are dead right, but most people participating in Audiogoninsane don't like this silly scientific mumbo jumbo, keep the numbers out of this, O.K.? You can use expressions and epithets such as "inner detail", "coherency", "grain", oh, and "lifting of veils" has not been used in a long time, lots of folks remember that one fondly, "slam" is always good (don't know how well it applies to phase problems, though), "back to front depth" is quite wonderful in its redundancy, well you see how this game is played now. Physics, you silly man...

Great thought piece. Where can I get a yard stick marked in nanometers? I'am sure a silver stick would measure with more sonic accuracy.

Cable lengths should be equal to preserve staging & imaging charactaristics. I guess that's what he'saying...

Hmm. Perhaps guessing again might be in order.

Nicely done Bwhite. How about multi-miked recordings with mics out of phase with each other?

Now someone want to explain the extent to which damping factors will differ one side from the other and the affect on the sound we will hear?

There are two issues that come to mind. First of all the electrical properties of speaker cable ARE to some extent length dependant and varying those parameters can effect how the amp interacts with the speakers. This is less of an issue in a 5.1 set up between the front pair and back pair since close matching is only needed with each stereo pair (the sound is really mixed as two stereo mixes plus center channel). Front to back balance will be more related to your position relative to the speaker. I agree that the phase issue is less pressing although the ear can resolve very tiny phase differences for sound localization (the comparison of the source at each ear allows an order of magnitude more resolution than either ear could accomplish alone), however since you will not be seated in the EXACT center and you may have an assymettrical room this is unlikely to make a great difference. However, different lengths within a stereo pair is IMHO a bad idea because of the resistance/capacitance issue.