When a signal is sent to a speaker to play a note, the cone vibrates. When the signal stops, the cone is still moving back and forth. and is an electric motor. This movement sends the electrical signal back to the amp, and a highly damped amp will stop the cone sooner. Amp won't make much difference in damping, since there are already many ohms of the speaker's voice coil in series. Overall effective damping factor is around df=1.5 at best. |
Oh god... Another big guage nut. With a link to a car audio page no less... I don't understand this philosophy of looking at the cables as some weird extension of the amplifier when they're most definitely a reactive load unto themselves. The car stereo article really doesn't tell the full story because it's mostly concerned with driving the subs in the trunk of some kid's 2003 Honda Civic. Cables have inductance, resistance, and capacitance and they can be modeled by a resistor, inductor, and capacitor wired in series. It should be pretty obvious that the behavior of such an arrangement is going to be extremely dependent on the frequency of the signal. The impedance and damping characteristics are going to depend entirely on the frequency. It would be really nice if cable manufacturers provided real numbers on what their cables measured like because they have to know what they are to design the things like they do. Looking at real measurements it becomes obvious that proper cables can compliment and focus the damping characteristics of the amplifier, and wrong ones can work against achieving the best results. And no, just throwing jumper cables at the problem isn't a solution. If it were, everybody would have 4g cables. https://www.passdiy.com/project/articles/speaker-cables |
Three plus years ago I was "on a mission" to find a new pair of floor-standing speakers. One of my stops was at a dealer to audition the then Magico S5's. As the "main" listening room was occupied, the salesman hooked the speakers to a Hegel power amp with a very high damping factor. When the "main" listening room became available, he wheeled the S5's over there and connected it to a pair of large tube monoblocks, with a very low damping factor, and driven by tubes, the Magico's sounded much more "musical" and had more bass. I suspect that, the pairing of a low damping factor and the Magico bass driver just worked better together. |
