Which worse- long I/C of speaker run

Designers like De Pavaricini favor long interconnect runs, some like Van Alstine say long speaker cable run. Who the hell knows?

I am of the belief that you are better off with short interconnects and longer speaker cables. That is, so long as the speaker cables are of a low impedance design.

Since most speaker cables are not designed correctly and don't offer this "feature", using shorter speaker cables can help alleviate some of the distortion and colouration that the speaker cables themselves are introducing into the system. Using such a set-up also takes into account that you would be using interconnects of high quality materials and design.

By high quality, i am talking about something with reasonable impedances and a design that lends itself to natural RFI and EMI rejection i.e. heavy shielding, braiding, twisting, star-quad, etc... and other similar geometries. Since it is easier to achieve such designs with smaller, less expensive conductors like those found in interconnects, i would not doubt that going the long interconnect / short speaker cable length is an improvement in many systems.

HOWEVER, If one were to simply change to speaker cables that were properly designed in terms of having a nominally low characteristic impedance, one would be able to achieve improved power transfer and coupling between amp and speaker. In doing so, the results of shortened speaker cables would be far less drastic. Then one could go back to using shorter interconnects, which will ALWAYS minimize signal loss and signal degradation.

If you want to find out how "good" or "knowledgable" a cable manufacturer is, ask them what the nominal impedance of one of their cables is within the AF ( audio frequency ) range ( HA HA HA ). If they do supply what seems to be a legit answer ( even bigger joke ) , ask them if you can get a copy of the electrical measurements that they've done on their cables. Since most "cable manufacturers" have never done anything like this nor have the phenomenally expensive test equipment to do this type of testing, this is a very easy way to narrow down who the REAL "wire / cable designers & engineers" are and who are "snake oil salesmen" that have simply jumped on a very profitable bandwagon.

Bare in mind that this does not mean that one can't come up with a "good" design working in ones' basement, but the chances that it is actually "superior" to what is already being manufactured are quite low. The main benefit to DIY'ing cables is the phenomenal amount of money that one might be able to save. The "fun" & "experimantation" factors are also quite high, making projects of this nature even more attractive. Sean
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George Tice told me to go the long speaker cable way. Shielded if the run was longer than 12 ft, since 60Hz hum can be picked up by the cable. Also to use 8 ga. size in order to keep low impedance.

I figure good amps can drive long speaker runs, good preamps ca drive long interconnect runs, too...

Sean,

Do you know of any low-impedance cables that you have tried and can recommend? I'm currently using a 16 ft run of Kimber 8TC, and always wondered how they might be coloring the sound. My system consists of Electrocompaniet EMC-1, Berning Zh-270 amp & Aerial 7B speakers. I'm running the EMC directly to the Berning using Quattro Fils.

Thanks.

I have done extensive study on this subject, including thousands of SPICE simulations. The conclusion of this study is that optimized systems will have 2-3X longer speaker cables than interconnects. This is independent of price-point and performance. The study results can be found at the Audio FAQ page of:
http://www.empiricalaudio.com

I know, one of you is going to ask "why is -1dB at 20kHz a fail criteria"? Well, this was arbitrary and is subtracted-out when the IC and speaker cable lengths are compared, so it does not change the conclusion.