Can This Amp Power A 50 Foot Speaker Cable Run?
Alternatively, if your inputs are truly balanced, run a balanced line instead, and put the amps near the speakers. +1 @mitch4t The amp won't have a problem driving the distance, but I think you will find that really long cables will rob the signal of detail and impact. In the case of cables that long, the difference between running a balanced line to the amps and then running really short speaker cables will be instantly obvious. |
Speaker cable if they have capacitance get get higher in capacitance the longer you go, an amp "if bordering" on becoming unstable, "can" go into oscillation with the higher capacitance of long cable runs. To cite an amp that was bordering on being unstable, the original Naim 250 in fact went into heavy oscillation and blew up as soon as it was turned on, when it saw the capacitance of Quad ESL 57's presented. Cheers George |
@mitch4t you can still run balanced lines if you want. For something like this I’ve run the preamp into a set of line transformers at the preamp end, run the balanced cables can converted back to single ended using line transformers at the other end. You get a lot more resolution than you do running long speaker cables! Of course if all the amps are built in to the same box this means you will have to get an additional set of amps for the rear channels. Since that may not be practical there is another option which is often used in public address, which is to use transformers at the output of the amplifiers to convert to a much higher voltage. Then you run the speaker cables and convert back at the speaker end to the regular voltage. Take a look at this link: http://www.belden.com/blog/broadcastav/All-About-70-volt-Speaker-Systems.cfm |
