Whats wrong with short cables?

sean...I just finished wiring up a pair of MTM speakers using flat rectangular wire, Nordost I think. Each speaker had 5 wires, two ends, with two conductors...that makes 40 wire ends to strip off Teflon insulation. You have to do this carefully with an Xacto knife: can't use a wire stripper. What a job! This stuff better sound good.

Hi Sean

The only time I tried Nordost, I tried Red Dawn, SPM and Quattro Fil and they all sounded a little bleached through the mids to me. However that was with an older pair of Thiels and with some Martin Logans - neither of which were likely to be good choices with the Nordost. In other respects I found the nordost to have wonderful speed, like that saying of "getting out of the way of the music". Now that I have some Sonus Fabers, I have a hankering to try them again. What I am curretly using with them is a local (New Zealand) cable called Sinkylinks. It will not suit all systems, perhaps sounding lean or lacking bass. But with the right speaker they are magical, and the bass is stunning.

I reckon amp/cable/speaker synergy is at the heart of getting great sound and that there are many good cables that can be just the right thing in the right system. It shouldn't be that way - but it is. I think the main reason for this is that none of the components we can buy are anything like perfect - and balancing the foibles/weaknesses is critical to getting the music to flow.

Redkiwi: Actually I am using Thiel 2.4's. but your observations about the Goertz with Thiel is similar to what I experienced.

OK, has anyone tried using wire coat hangers for speaker wire like the "morrison link" suggested (that 'pragmatist' mentioned above)?

Part of Rule 3 in Morrison:

"Just snuggle one monaural amplifier up behind each speaker. You can use a foot of any kind of wire here. A bent coat hanger with the insulation scraped off will do the trick."

I did a few experiments backing my monos up to the speaker terminals and connecting 6 inch links as speaker cables. It became very hard to distinguish the differences between cables, where those differences had been very noticeable with 3 foot lengths. But these were still good cables being used. On the other hand, a link as bad as those horrid brass bridges used on bi-wire speakers is noticeably worse than using decent cable as a jumper.