Good value speaker cable advice please.

googler

Hammyman wrote: »

Err, no. That's your brain convincing yourself that you've not just realised how stupid you've been buying expensive cable you didn't need.

Lets look at it from a technical point of view.

The signal that is sent out is a sinewave of varying amplitude and frequency. It has varying voltage and current. The cable needs to be able to handle the frequency, voltage and the current and to have sufficient ability to reject unwanted signals. Ideally, the loss in the cable needs to be minimal to ensure as much of the power in the outputted signal makes it to the speaker, although increasing the power outputted (turning up the volume) compensates and unless you're running cables 100m long and have 3dB loss on that, you're not really going to notice much. Once you've got a cable that does that, then no additional ability provides any additional benefit.

It doesn't matter if its oxygen free or any other free. It cannot modify the waveform being outputted from the amplifier to any beneficial effect. A cable NOT up to meeting the minimum requirements will be detrimental but once you get up to around 1mm diameter core, then for home use you're not going to get any problems other than interference due to poor screening. In fact, its actually the screening capabilities you want to be interested in because at the lengths of typical speaker wires, they make very good antennas for HF and LF frequencies and you're more likely to get RF induced noise being picked up and outputted through the speakers from all kinds of sources.

Speaker wiring, along with gold plated optical leads, is one of the biggest cons there is.

Boy, oh boy.... where to start?

Calling someone 'stupid' for claiming perceived audible differences in cables is of itself, stupid. Can you prove that the previous poster can't tell the difference? If you listen to the same comparison, can you hear what he hears? No, you can't.

If you don't hear any differences, that's fine - you carry on with your 2.5mm mains twin-core. I'll experiment with the cables that give me the most satisfaction from my music.

"Let's look at it from a technical point of view" - ah, yes, the 'scientific' approach. Science is merely the most appropriate explanation at any given time for the phenomena around us. At one time, science held the Earth to be flat. It's not. At one time, science held that the Earth was static, and the stars and sun moved around us. Now we know this to be untrue.

An audio signal is emphatically NOT a 'sine wave'. A sine wave follows a precise arc in a defined fashion. Music doesn't.

Your assertion that all a cable need do is handle the frequency, voltage in order to do its job merely demonstrates the failure of the scientific method - you cite only those criteria of which you know, and insist that because differences can't be shown with regard to these criteria, there can be no differences - but the test of the cable isn't the technical spec; it's what it sounds like in partnership with a certain combination of other gear.

What's a "gold plated optical lead" ....????

googler

kwikbreaks wrote: »

There is not a shred of technical evidence to back up the vast majority of the "lore" that has built up around HiFi equipment (and especially cables) so suggesting that it it necessary to spend several pounds a meter on specialist cables for speakers where given the impedance and frequency range involved the technical requirements are minimal needs some reference to proof that it will make a difference. And that means proof beyond some posts on the AV Forum.

I've tried mains cable and I've tried various brands of speaker cable, settling on my current Van den Hul 'Clearwater'.

You can test them all you like, but if you apply some tests to them, find no 'technical' differences, then tell me because of that they can't or don't sound different, then I'd say you need a new testing method, for I can clearly hear a difference between them, on varying equipment setups.

If you wanted to prove that I can't, how would you do it?

fwor

googler wrote: »

If you wanted to prove that I can't, how would you do it?

If you want to prove you can, a double-blind A/B/X test showing a statistically significant positive would do the trick.

I don't think any high-end cable makers have ever shown this quality of evidence for their claims.

tomstickland

Someone I know who is knowledgable told me that mains flex was one of the best speaker cables to use. Either that or buy it 2nd hand off a hi-fi bore.

tomstickland

aliEnRIK wrote: »

Ive physically measured differences

Now, that would be interesting.
Hi-fi mags etc never seem to bother measuring anything.

Put a square wave or impulse in and see what comes out, do a Fourier analysis on that and it'll give the frequency response of the cable.

aliEnRIK

googler wrote: »

I've tried mains cable and I've tried various brands of speaker cable, settling on my current Van den Hul 'Clearwater'.

You can test them all you like, but if you apply some tests to them, find no 'technical' differences, then tell me because of that they can't or don't sound different, then I'd say you need a new testing method, for I can clearly hear a difference between them, on varying equipment setups.

If you wanted to prove that I can't, how would you do it?

I went round to a blokes house a couple of months back. He wanted to try some mains leads
We fitted an isotek elite to his (Gigantic) sub. This made it sound awful, boomy as hell. But more importantly this wasnt a subjective difference as it also made the light fitting move all over the place. Changed to a braided cable and it tightened the bass up a treat and the light fitting stopped shifting. So anyone wants to say mains cables cant possibly make a difference ill just have them watch the 'light fitting' test

kwikbreaks

Ah - so braided cables reduce the bass response then? I thought HiFidelity meant retaining the exact waveform even if it was "boomy as hell".

Perhaps pre-emphasis was applied to the recording to counter inefficiencies in those terrible braided cables that some like to spend a fortune on?

I expect the next fad will be the colour of the insulation.

aliEnRIK

I posted purely to show mains cables can 'make a difference'

The idea of a mains lead is to allow as much power through as possible whilst cleaning RFI out of the mains supply and rejecting airbourne RFI and EMI

kwikbreaks

Well if you swap mains lead for something inferior then I guess the results will be different and there could be attenuation of the lower frequencies leading to what you observed. The low end usually carries a lot of power so you do need quite thick cables such as mains lead to handle it properly.

aliEnRIK

Theres more copper in the braided cable than there was in the elite