Take your 2-foot speaker wires and wrap them tightly around a wad of $100 bills. The effect will be exactly like long expensive cables.
Whats wrong with short cables?
Hello Fellow Audionuts!!!!
Just curious....
Why should speaker cables be 8 feet and over? I hear that sometimes shorter cables can cause blown tweets and such during extended guitar solo's and stuff like that.
I always kinda assumed the shorter the run the better.
Im researching into building my own Pre, SS Amps, Speakers, and cables. I was planning on running a stereo amp pair for each speaker and bi-amping them. The amplifiers will be on thier own stands between the pre/cdp/tuner and the speaker. That means i will have a speaker cable run of probably less than 4 feet.
Would it be better to tailor the legnth of the cable to the distance needed? or would it be better to use a cable over 8 feet in legnth and just have it coiled behind the speaker?
Just curious....
Why should speaker cables be 8 feet and over? I hear that sometimes shorter cables can cause blown tweets and such during extended guitar solo's and stuff like that.
I always kinda assumed the shorter the run the better.
Im researching into building my own Pre, SS Amps, Speakers, and cables. I was planning on running a stereo amp pair for each speaker and bi-amping them. The amplifiers will be on thier own stands between the pre/cdp/tuner and the speaker. That means i will have a speaker cable run of probably less than 4 feet.
Would it be better to tailor the legnth of the cable to the distance needed? or would it be better to use a cable over 8 feet in legnth and just have it coiled behind the speaker?
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- 37 posts total
The consensus among the experts such as Martin Colloms or the designers at Audio Synthesis is that the speaker wires are the weaker link. I have found this to be true in my experience. Pierre Sprey at Mapleshade has the opposite opinion. I know Pierre and his opinion carries weight so I have ordered a pair of his speaker cables to see. The whole question may well be system dependent. As to the short cables causing tweeter damage, I have never heard this in 42 years in audio. It would seem to assume that(1) the amp would somehow be unstable without a sufficient length of wire to load it, or (2) that without a longer run of interconnect to attenuate the treble the signal would be too strong. Neither seems likely. Stan |
Most speaker cables are deficient in design and using a longer length gives you more of a problem. By keeping poorly designed speaker cables as short as possible, you redue the effects that they have on the system. As such, the logical deduction would be that longer speaker cables = lower performance. This is true when you start off with something that is sub-standard to begin with. If one were to purchase "real" speaker cables that are correctly designed, you don't have to worry about running longer lengths with their signal degradation creeping in. Sean > The Science behind speaker cable technology |
- 37 posts total