Speaker cable vs. interconnect cable length

Tonyptony, Depending your budget, the new Harmonic Tech Cyberlight cables (in non-balanced RCA type) have absolutely zero loss over very long runs. This is due to thier fiber optic technology. No need to use balanced cables for long runs anymore. Although the 1 meter run is expensive, the 5 to 8 meter cables start to become cost competitive with the other long state of the art cables out there. Go to Harmonic's website and read the reviews. I think the concept makes sense, should change the future of cables, and ordered some last week.

Tgun5, that's out of my price range. I like the concept, though. We use stuff like this all the time at work - that is, wire to fiber converters. Mostly either for digital data or streaming video. The fiber converters we use, however, are not that small.

Interconnect carries just signal
Speaker cable carries signal and power
More issues with long speaker cable
Use short speaker cable

Our experience would indicate that short speaker cables/ long interconnects will out-perform long speaker cables/ short interconnects almost every time.

The circumstances under which one can "get away with" long speaker cables would be in a system which utilizes extremely efficient speakers ... something exceeding 95db/watt where current requirements are vanishingly low.

Yours in Music,

I seem to remember Fulton suggesting an optimum length for the interconnect(anyone remember this?). I thought it was something like 27 inches, but when I measured some Fulton browns, they were like 53 inches(approximately). I believe that Transparent audio says there is an optimum length per type of cable. This doesn't pertain so much to your particular problem, but there doesn't seem to be another thread about interconnect length. I just want to mention that the 8 feet+ that Mapleshade recommends was probably done with much work(i.e. I trust them).