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?
slappy
Subaruguru...I vote for short cables, like 1 foot with the monoblock amp adjacent ro the speaker. However, if you have too-long cables that need to be tidied up, coiling them can be OK. First of all, the air-core inductor created by coiling several feet of cable would be of very low value...especially for the woofer signal which goes directly into a large inductor of the crossover network. Furthermore, for the perfectionist, you can coil the wire in the same configuration that non-inductive wirewound resistors are made. Make a large loop of all the wire you want to coil, and then wind the coiled (2-wire) loop. tightly.
Sean, thanks for pointing to the AA thread. I have a set of your preferred cables sitting around, which I happened to stick in the system (between Pass 150 and Thiel 2.4) the other night. No Zoebel networks, however. Sound was disappointing, but maybe I'll give it a longer audition. --Dan
I asked my Fiancee, she says "short cables" lack depth and definitely have presentation shortcomings. =) Lucky for me, I receive about 100 emails a day on how to "lengthen my cable."
Distortion, not to worry, after your fiancee becomes your wife, you won't be needing that cable anymore anyway, so length becomes a non-issue.=)
Sean, that is the speaker wire I am getting ready to bulid: copper ribbon, cryo'ed, hand polished and stacked on top of each other.