A hard look at the effect of cables

Dave,

Sorry for the caps - too much coffee this morning I guess,

As for moratorium on passive speakers....no I don't believe that. I agree that that the vast majority of the best speakers are passive.

I believe that for a well designed amp and for well designed speakers ( that are a suitable match) then the cables should have minimal effect (barely audible). I know many audiophiles vehemently disagree with this concept. I suspect the links in this thread to respected researchers who have discovered distortion when an amp and speaker complex load are coupled by a cable is intended to prove what many believe; speaker cables are a significant issue in home hi-fi and they dramatically affect the sound.

So my suggestion to those "cable worried people" would be to simply investigate Active Speakers - because this largely eliminates the problems with cable choice and matching amp to speaker load by leaving these critical choices to the designer with their skills and lab test equipment. I also gave justifications for why active designs will reduce this problem significantly . The most compelling argument, for those non technical minded, is to realize that the cable is almost eliminated altogether (it becomes at least 10 times shorter...an order of magnitude less important)

hi shadorne. there are two cable interfaces that you may be overlooking, namely the source to preamp and the preamp to amp. what about transport to dac. and what about line cords ?

ihave personally observed affects of line cords with respect to the above mentioned interfaces.

by the way, i am not aware of any panel that is fully active. some provide an amp to a woofer driver, but then the owner must furnish the amp for the panel.

Nothing is truly passive. Even what we call passive is reactive.

I still find it hard to fathom how a speaker cable can be so important, considering the inductors, capacitors and windings in the drivers of the speakers. It's almost comical after the mile of wire in an output transformer. Yet, I've heard amazing changes, at least once.

It should be noted that IC's are completely different and capacitance/inductance play a bigger role.

I'm disappointed that this thread isn't more controversial and misunderstood.

This article unfortunately reminds me of attempting to make good speaker cables using my Nakamichi AV10 as test amp. What finally sounded only OK on AV10 was poor on everything else. The weird loads with normal speakers is why I was so taken (and purchased) some TBI speakers as they are closer to resistive load than inductive. I have not seem many threads from people with successfull experience from 2 inch long speaker cable mono amp hook-up. How can we normal folks use this info ?

hi shadorne. there are two cable interfaces that you may be overlooking, namely the source to preamp and the preamp to amp. what about transport to dac

Since these are just signal cables (almost no power or current), they have a specifically designed buffer circuit at the input of each component in a chain (rather than a nasty complex load of a speaker). These cables are far less of an issue than speaker cables. The components can be designed to preserve signal integrity across interconnects to a much higher degree.

So 20 feet of shielded XLR with good components at each end is therefore much better than the equivalent in speaker cable connected to a nasty complex load.