If a speaker cable added 1 - 2 ohms of resistance would that be?


A good thing.

A bad thing.

A very good thing.

A very bad thing.

 

We are talking in generalities here. I am sure there are also exceptions.

deludedaudiophile

DC resistance will affect the bass the most. It will make the sound lacking dynamic since the amp won’t be able to drive the woofer as hard.

An 8ft cable should have no more than .1 or .2 ohm of DC resistance.

If the cable is 1.7 or 1.9 ohms does it really matter? The point is there is a big resistance. Even if it was 1.0 or 1.2 ... is close enough. For 8 ft it will be about 1.5.

If these are 1-2 ohms, a standard good quality meter should get you close enough. Not perfect, but close enough.

No, you really need to make a four-wire measurement.  1 or 2 ohm is too much for a 8ft cable.

@pmerendino,

If these are 1-2 ohms, a standard good quality meter should get you close enough. Not perfect, but close enough.

For inductance, back of envelope assuming 2 inch average spacing would be 400nH/foot. At 6" that is 1.1uH / foot. That's just first order equations. I could simulate it in FEA but hardly seems worth it. If my math is right that’s about 0.7 ohms impedance but at 20KHz and I have not been able to hear there for a long time. Back to my stereophile phase and impedance charts, the impact would depend on the speaker. It does not seem like a good design to allow the inductance to be so variable.

 

You really need to make a 4 wire measurenent to accurateley measure resistance especially at this low value.  And as I understand the Inductance of the wire makes more diff than the resistance...

Of course, @crustycoot is correct that a couple of ohms of speaker-cable resistance will degrade the realized damping factor considerably. The nominal damping factor is usually computed

DF = 8 / Z

where 8 is the assumed impedance of the loudspeaker, and Z the output impedance of the amplifier.

So you would achieve a nominal damping factor of 200 (not out of the ballpark for a SS amp) with the output impedance of the amp being 0.04 ohms. If you add 10 feet of Belden 5T00UP, you’d add another 0.01 ohms, and the effective DF would be 160. If you added 2 ohms of cable resistance, the effective DF would be about 4.

Some prefer an underdamped sound.

P.S. I am prone to typos and simple math errors, so if I’ve made any, please point them out and correct them.

@nonoise 

I went to their website because the construction looked really interesting. It piqued my curiosity. When I read their marketing information, things were not adding up for me. My background is solid state physics and material sciences for semiconductors and batteries so I live this stuff (materials, not cables). It did not take long to narrow it down to what the base properties must be, what the likely material was, and important, that the material would be high resistance. That resistance is missing from the marketing material.

 

That would make your solid state amplifier sound like tube amplifier. It will eliminate the effects of dynamic damping, possibly screw with your speakers cross over (no in a damaging way) depending on the speaker

You can measure, but the figures I posted are accurate. They appear to sell 4-10 feet versions. The figures I posted are for the total loop (both wires).

They are not buying them because of the resistance because they don't even know it is there. They are liking it because of the resistance. It would swamp every other property of the cable. I think Eric is right, it is a tone control that cannot be changed. If the most common change is to raise the mid-range, is that not normally a change that people prefer at first? I don't know if that would be a long term preference.

 

No one is buying Fideliums because of the resistance.

I'll measure mine for you this weekend as I swap out amps. I believe mine are 11 feet(?).

Why would this be any different than the boxes MIT and Transparent put on their cables?

I want to point out, that the difference in sound would be audible, maybe even euphonic, but if you want a tone control for heaven’s sake get a tone control. Far cheaper and probably better sounding.

No one has mentioned the potential audibility of the loss of woofer damping a series resistance of several Ohms would have although Erik and Mike circle around the fact. Of course plenty of “speaker selector” boxes have been sold and used by non-audiophiles that feature beefy 3 Ohm series resistors.  

Ah old farmer the difference is you likely can’t buy one such as mine whether you have the cash and likely not…less than 80 made and I’m not selling. Lol

Listen to that music

@mike_in_nc     @1971gto455ho 

Agreed 100%

Lots of gullible, easily persuaded types eager to spend money in their relentless pursuit of sonic perfection. Plenty of products available with absolutely no technical proof of their claims to improve what we hear. I browse this forum and find more laughable BS than useful information.

Same thing in the old V8 cars you can sell people anything so long as the number of cubic inches is big enough!

@mike_in_nc 

Such is the Audiophile Industry, pastes, pads, Cable risers, Super fuses, Magic rocks, H…you could sell magic beans  if ya charged enough Lol

Cheers

I've concluded audiophiles are crazy. You can sell them anything if you make it expensive enough and get some guy with no qualifications to say on YouTube that he likes it. Then people will like the sound on one album and one system and say it blows everything else away. Eventually a wacky "theory" {completely unsupported by meaningful data or known theory of electronics) will appear to explain why it's better. After a while, the owners will sell it and move on to something else.

Sorry, I must have indigestion tonight.

Do you have any Silversmith Fidelium? 6 feet is 1.1 ohm total. 10 feet, 1.8 ohms.

I don't live in the parallel universe where someone thought that was a good idea ... but someone did.

@deludedaudiophile
I’m not sure what parallel universe you reside in but I just measured some: 


9 feet of Audio Arts SC-5 14 gauge - .2

8 feet of Blue Jeans Cable (Belden) - .6

15 feet of RCA zip - .3 


On a Fluke 77
I’m with Alfred E. Neuman on this one. Why don’t you cipher how many eggs make a dozen? Studying impedance curves will make you cross eyed.

@deludedaudiophile  - As you increase the amplifier's effective output impedance the effective frequency response of the speaker would track the impedance curve. 

@fuzztone 

Why?  Because there is a cable that seems to get a heavy amount of interest here, currently a thread running on it, and guess what, depending on length, it has about 1-2 ohms of resistance. That's missing from the marketing blurbs, and of course it is not in any online review.

Lots of positive reviews (not all), and of course it will be a very audibly different cable from any other cable. This is one case where there is no question, the difference will be audible. However, if you paid big bugs for a speaker with a great frequency response, or big buck for an amplifier with a low impedance output, then using this cable will negate both of those things.

Taking a quick look at some impedance curves on Stereophile, I would say most speakers have a rising impedance in the midrange (1-3K), a dip in mid-bass(80-300Hz), and then a big rise at low frequency. What happens at upper frequencies are all over the map. Just looking at a few Magico, one rises to 6 ohms then up to 8. One stays near 4. One Tannoy rises up to 16-20 ohms.

If my interpretation is right, midrange would appear louder in most cases, mid-bass a bit subdued, maybe a bit more deep bass, and highs you are rolling the dice. If you have a low impedance speaker, my math says up to 2+ db changes in the frequency response.

To me it looks like an expensive resistor.

Your speaker’s output would deviate and track the impedance of the speaker instead of the original frequency response. It would be a lot like using a tube amp.

While you can experiment with this, please keep the wattage of any resistors in mind. I’d stick to 10W or higher for low - mid level experimentation.

I also want to point out that speakers with high resistance also heat up.  Attempting to use undersized speaker cable, like 18 gauge or thinner, with large amps can be a fire hazard.

I'm expecting a 1-2 Ohms resistance in speaker cables would impact the signal presented to the speakers and different than the designer of the speakers or amplifiers considered.

If the speaker’s impedance changes markedly with frequency -- as speakers tend to do -- a couple of ohms in the speaker cable would be a bad thing indeed. It would form a voltage divider whose values vary with frequency. That would change the frequency response in what you hear from the speakers. (I mean it would change it objectively, not in some magic audiophile way.)

It would not be worthy of worry. Better to insert a small resistor and see if you like it.

WHY??