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speaker wires

R

rdoust

New Member
Now that I'm a member of your club (maybe I'm not truly until I have the product in my hands) I have a question on a topic that, as I understand it, gets people excited. The Director of Acoustic Research at McIntosh has published a document on the internet that says that expensive speaker wire is a waste of money. http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm Yesterday I received the Avia Guide to Home Theater and they say the same thing. While I was at Harvey's, everyone swore that the opposite is true. In every picture of a system that I see where people are using high-end gear, many of your own, I see gargantuan speaker wires. Can someone give me the skinny :D on this?
I look forward to hearing from everyone on this.
 
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Well, this has been done a few times before! :D

Basically, some folks think that it is mostly useless, others swear to the higher powers by it. I'm somewhere in-between -- buy decent, but don't get too carried away. As Mr. Russell tends to have a bit more experience in audio than I do, I tend to respect his opinions somewhat...
 
"Martha, take the kids and run fer th' cellar, there's a storm a-coming!"

OK, only kidding. But of course you know that the relative validity of different arguments can be solved for your personal situation by performing your own tests on your own equipment, and see if you can tell a difference. THAT is the "acid test", so to speak. Just make sure you can return the fancy ones just in case you don't hear the difference.

"Nothing to excess", I always say. Of course, the question is where do you draw the line between "excess" and reasonable?
 
Speaker wires (of sufficient size for the length of run) can either make no difference (Leaving replacement of old green or corroded wires out of it) or wire can "Color” the sound, due to changes in capacitance over the length of the wire. Is the change better? Only your ears can say for sure. The Bose philosophy of psycho acoustics applies here, insofar as the ability of the human mind to adjust to different sounds, and possibly preconceived notions of what to expect, and decide whether it is better or worse is boundless and impossible to predict.

(An amusing read on “psycho acoustics” is the Wikipedia article on Bose)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_Corporation

I neither endorse nor negate the Bose interpretation of “psycho acoustics”, I simply note that it does exist…

























(Question for after reading the Bose Article:

Is Bose brainwashing the great masses psychologically to be so successful?)


:lurk:
 
Fancy speaker cable is just manfacturers cashing in on the normal human placibo effect. If you beleive something sounds better, probably becasue you paid big bucks for it, it WILL sound better! I once replace the #14 lamp cord I had running from my Mc250 amp to my modified Belle Klipsch speakers. I replaced it with #12 wire. I even opened the bass bins and ran it all the way to the woofer drivers. The difference was totally zip! No difference at all! The cables were about 20 feet long. I think if your speakers are 4 Ohms, you shold have heavy gauge wires, but don't wast money on fancy woven cables or special stuff. Just get ordinary stuff intended for speakers. Trying to match impedances is also a waste. A missmatched transmission line, in theory, will casue a change in the impedance presented by a load as seen by a generator, BUT only if the lines is a significent part of a wavelength. At audio, this amounts to MILES in length, not feet! Inductance of a wire is also sometimes mentioned as being a problem. Current is flowing in opposite directions in each of the two wires. This will cancel the inductance of each. All that is left is the capacity between wires. That is a moot point at audio also. It's to low to bother anyhting. The fact is that the ratio of inductance to distributed capacity for any give length DEFINES the impedance of a transmission line. Again, it needs to be miles ling to bother anyhting if it's not a 4 or 8 Ohm cable. All that remains is DC resistance. Keep that low with heavy gauge wire and it also becomes a moot point considering the DC resistance of a woofer voice coil which is much higher. There's also the DC resistance of the inductors in you crossover network added in there!


AL K.
 
tentoze's take on speaker wires:

Let your ears decide, not the opinions of strangers on Internet forums.
 
The issue has been debated forever, what I always wondered about these super heavy and expensive speaker cables is the part that we do net see. You can connect the power amp to the speaker terminals using 1” thick super cables, but on the other side of the speaker terminals the wiring that is used to connect to the crossovers and finally to the individual drivers are generally pretty thin, so what is gained by using such heavy external cables if they do not extend all the way to the drivers?
 
FIY: Roger Russel wires his own IDS-25 speakers internally with Cardas wire. He did it to please the masses so he can sell more speakers? I don't know but if I have been preaching one sided theories all my life, I would be too embarrassed and stick to my guns. :dunno: http://www.ids25.com/specifications.htm
 
It's hard to put in crap speaker wire when you've put so much money into all the other components. I believe that speaker wire can make a difference, but it's miniscule and it's more a change of character than quality. That said, I will NOT spend mega bucks on speaker wire.

You'll often hear from people who have bought expensive cables that it has made an incredible difference. They haven't done a double-blind test, and their interest (even if completely subconcious) dictates that they like the more expensive wire. As long as your current wire is up to spec (clean, no corrosion, enough gauge for the job, etc.), it doesn't matter if it's age-annealed copper extracted from pigeon embryos.

I'm inclined to go with Roger Russell on this one. The problem is, no one feels 'right' in spending mega-$$$'s on gear (that makes a clear, measurable improvement) and then hooking it together with cheap zip cord.

Lets make a few assumptions and then ask a few questions.
1. You would only use speaker wire that is capable of operating within the recommended specs for your speaker/amp. Inductance, Capacitance, Resistance, etc., are all correct.

Does wire make a difference? Yes.
Is the return exponentially diminishing? I believe so.
Is the difference "better" or just "different"? "different
 
Does wire make a difference? Yes.
Is the return exponentially diminishing? I believe so.
Is the difference "better" or just "different"? "different
Click to expand...
The audiophiles have been using this "difference" to "fine tune" their systems for decades.
 
Physics is physics and electron behavior is predictable--they move down a conductor. If the conductors are equal in terms of getting the electrons to flow through the conductor, then there should be no sound difference. There are a few companies that really go overboard in creating the illusion that they can actually train the electrons to behave differently -- for eg., making sure that the electrons from the bass frequencies travel so that they arrive at the speakers at the same time as the electrons from the upper frequencies...

I wonder IF there has ever been a double blind test involving an adequate number of tests as to be statistically significant to prove the superiority in very high end (thousands of dollars) speaker wires vs. the more moderately-priced wires or even zip cord?

MikeSp
 
There is an illness in this hobby of ours and I call it "tweaking-itis" the urge to tweak your system all the time. Those people do not love music or movies, they love their gear, they are in love with technology and not art.
They look after the impossible Grail of "perfect" sound. Of course I invested a lot in my system, but I enjoy it -with my family and friends- and I am not looking what new cable, connector or tweak can add.
Marketing professionals and companies know that. And cables is by far the easier way to tweak a system ad nauseam. They cater their snake oil to those people claiming anything short of eternal life. Physics is physics, science is science and electrons are electrons. The same people selling you 1000 $ a feet cable will sell you all the other esoteric things to "improve" your system. At the same time they will say that double blind test is wrong. Of course "golden ear" trade journalists will swear that they can hear HUGE differences.
Non sense. It is funny to read how the reference system of a journalist that yesterday was perfect all of the sudden is more transparent or liquid or whatever they want to call it after changing a connector or a speaker cable making me to think that probable it was not so perfect before. The next issue the same "liquid and transparent" will go up another notch with another tweak and so on and so forth. So, how bad was the system in the beginning?.
I use good components, extremely well built (McIntosh!) good cables and good connectors. And then I sit down and try to enjoy what to me is really important: music (and movies). I do not like snake oil. :music:
 
PHC1 said:
The audiophiles have been using this "difference" to "fine tune" their systems for decades.
Click to expand...

I probably should've gone on to say, "so, whether or not it's 'better' is up to you and your ears. Experiment a little and find what works best for your setup." Which is, IMO, a total cop-out. Buy a quality cable, but I don't think you're going to ever find enough difference in speaker cables to justify $1000 cables. Let the first person here who has truly run a double-blind test speak loudest.

To further complicate things, I do believe that interconnects matter. Again, not to the tune of $1000, but you definitely want a quality connection between source and pre-amp/amp. IMO and IME, this will make more difference.
 
I use good components, extremely well built (McIntosh!) good cables and good connectors. And then I sit down and try to enjoy what to me is really important: music (and movies). I do not like snake oil.
Click to expand...
What are "good" cables?
 
I probably should've gone on to say, "so, whether or not it's 'better' is up to you and your ears. Experiment a little and find what works best for your setup." Which is, IMO, a total cop-out. I don't think you're going to ever find enough difference in speaker cables to justify $1000 cables. Let the first person here who has truly run a double-blind test speak loudest.
Click to expand...
I have, I have never heard a "huge" difference but when everything else is in place, you can "fine tune" with cables. I don't subscribe to the "high priced" cables theory, just not enough price/performance return for my hard earned $$$ but I have heard them make a difference, whether that difference is justifiable is only up to the one who will have to pay for them.

There are much more effective ways of spending money to improve system performance, by far the biggest is your room. Acoustic treatments will make your whole system sound different, so much so that budget components WILL blow expensive ones out the water in a treated room. A high performance system in a treated room will be in a league all of its own of course. No amount of $$$ spent on cables will ever come close to improvement in room acoustics, that I have witnessed myself in my own as well as many other systems, no blind or double blind or any other tests needed, the difference is real and readily perceived. However, in a well treated room and with gear offering enough resolution, you WILL hear the subtle differences some cables offer. Again, who is to decide if they are worth it? Only the guy paying for them. Cables are the last tweak in my book of priorities but when everything else is in place, it is the logical last step to "tweak" your system at what ever price level you desire.

For my current system and room acoustics, the Guerrilla Audio, Zebra and Nordost products offer the level of performance where there is nothing to be gained from going further up the price ladder, I HAVE tried. In my older room that WAS treated, I used much more expensive cables. It's good to have friends who have quite a stash of real expensive stuff that has accumulated over many years and to be able to borrow them anytime. After many auditions, the GA, Zebra and Nordost is all I need.
 
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