are all amps equal

03-30-09: Tvad
Most of us start where Keslerd is presently, i.e. not wanting to spend $500/6 ft of wire.

I know I did.

Well, you're right, of course. For all the bluster in my previous post, I'm a bottom-feeder when it comes to cables. I firmly believe in the benefit of up-quality cables, but I also have trouble paying full pop. Depends on the cable and the availability. But then that's true of all my audio gear.

On the one hand I got the $1500 PS Audio XStream Bi-wire speaker cables on closeout from Audio Advisor for $350. On the other hand I paid full price ($160/pr at the time) for three pairs of Kimber Heroes and was glad to do it because they deliver great value for the asking price.

I may scour for bargains, but I use mostly multi-gauge (such as Kimber Varistrand--to minimize skin effect) single-crystal high purity copper in both the surround HT rig and the LP-driven 2-channel system. Once you've heard what monocrystal copper does to preserve the signal it's hard going back.

Just to bring everyone up to date. I have placed an order for a McIntosh MC2250 from Audio Classics. After reading your response to "just wire" I have a shopping cart at Blue Jean for all my cables useing their "favorite" CABLES.

Still not clear on the speaker wire, their site said the bigger the better. I currently use 12 gauge with banannas, so I'm not clear on which direction to go on the speaker connections.
Thanks for all the help...

I have converted a few people to 'believe' in good wire after a simple demonstration. The last one was just a move up to AZ WOW ICs and the improvement was huge with a bigger soundstage and more information top to bottom. Neither of us could believe it frankly. I expected an improvement but not to this extent.

All this with a (relativly) inexpensive ($150) IC. My buddy is now sold on wire and I get blamed (by his wife) for the added expense. =8^)

BTW you are well on your way with the Blue Jean wire I am sure. I hope you enjoy the benefits...

Keslerd - bigger is not always better. People use very thick wire to get lower resistance (and slightly lower inductance as well) but choke in series with the woofer is probably in order of 0.1 ohm and fighting for ultra low cable resistance doesn't make a sense. Skin effect in copper starts at about gauge 18 (20kHz) and might start having some effect in very thick wires. Some people and web sites will tell you that it's non-audible but the same people/web sites claim that type of metal (copper, silver gold) is non-audible.

Stranding wires help but you have two problems here. Strands should be isolated - otherwise current tend to go to outside and jumps from strand to strand. Second problem is that even if surface area is increased by stranding they still sit in each-others magnetic field and skin effect still applies. Many manufacturers put isolated strands around hollow core reducing effectively strand to strand magnetic field.

12 gauge sound perhaps as low as I would go. Audioquest made for a while very successful speaker wire Type 4 that had single conductors and gauge 14.

I use acoustic Zen Satori (very thick!)that in single run configuration can be bought used for about $250. Analysis Plus speaker cables are also very good and cheaper than AZ. I had AQ before but I think that it is in general overpriced (you pay for a name).

The strange thing is that if you ask how important speaker cable is most of the people will say that it's much less important than IC, but if you ask which one should be shorter than most of people will recommend long IC and short speaker cable. At least that was my impression.

Re skin effect, following is a quotation from this paper, http://svconline.com/mag/avinstall_designer_cables_critical/, by Bill Whitlock of Jensen Transformers, who is a distinguished authority in relevant areas. See his bio here: http://www.jensen-transformers.com/execprof.html

Skin effect is another problem exaggerated by hype. As frequency increases, current flow in a wire tends to concentrate toward its outer surface, causing an increase in AC resistance. At 20 kHz, for example, skin depth is 0.018 inch (0.46 mm), where 63% of current flow is between the surface and this depth (see footnote 4 below). For line-level audio interconnects, the effect is absolutely inconsequential even if center conductor resistance doubles or triples, because it accounts for less than 0.01% of total circuit resistance anyway. For loudspeaker cable, there may be some measurable effects because total circuit impedance is lower, but we're still talking about increases in resistances that, if the wire gauge is properly chosen for reasonable losses, are negligible in the first place.

(footnote 4) Ralph Morrison, "Solving Interference Problems in Electronics," John Wiley & Sons, 1995, pp. 61-62.

Regards,
-- Al