Cables from amp to preamp or longer speaker cables…


So today I was in the room that I’m setting up for dedicated listening. Speakers will be at the front of the room and sofa will be at the other end. I dug out a pair of expensive speaker cables I had from many years ago and discovered they are only about six feet long. This would be ok if I had my rig set up behind the speakers but I want to sit on that sofa at the far end of the room (12 feet away) and have my Benchmark DAC 3 HGC beside me so I can plug headphones in occasionally……do I buy long speaker cables (probably expensive), or would I place my amp behind the speakers and run long cable from that to the preamp beside the sofa and if so would this long cable create any issues?

thomastrouble

Showing 1 response by christian

Long interconnect/short speaker and short interconnect/long speaker - I’ve run both, and really haven’t been able to really tell a difference between either configuration. And this was with single ended RCA interconnects. I was lucky to have pretty clean power in my new construction home, plus a very benign EMI environment.

What Paul says ^^^ in his initial opening to his video was my understanding: short interconnect/long speaker is best, since the preamp can’t drive the long cables but the amp surely can. But the other side of the coin is that the amp’s output drive capability, damping factor, etc. is best with a short run of cable. So you’re in a double edged sword configuration.

Now with XLRs, however - that changes things up a bit. If you have XLRs, then a long run to your amp should provide you a very clean signal to your amp, then a short cable run to your speakers; the best of both worlds.