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
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.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scots_Guide/audio/skineffect/page1.html

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scots_Guide/intro/electron.htm

A couple of good sites on cable theory.