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What is the purpose of

Hi. I am fairly new to Audiogon and if this question has been discussed before, I apologize. Reading this you will realize I know practically nothing about electronics, and even less about component design. When you look inside a piece of equipment, you usually see very thin wires used, to say nothing about the fuses commonly seen, with a wire about the width of a hair. Then, when the signal finally reaches the speakers, there is usually more very thin wire throughout the crossover. So what is the point of buying (sometimes) obscenely expensive interconnects and speaker cable? Isn't the audio signal chain only as strong as its weakest link? Or am I missing something obvious? Any answers or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
xrayz

Showing 2 responses by sean

sean
6,231 posts
 
Your analogy is completely logical and TRUE. However, any steps taken to improve the system will benefit the end result. However, those benefits may not be fully manifested until everything has been "worked to death" and the system has been "tweaked whole hog".

Keep in mind that there are many proponents of "small gauge" wire and even remove larger wires to replace them with "hair fine" conductors. Like anything else, you can find people on both sides of the fence. There are even those that sit and walk on top of the fence. Sean
sean
6,231 posts
 
Twl, it is sometimes not the gauge that matters, but the geometry of the conductors being used. Goertz speaker cables are very heavy gauge ( range from 7 gauge to 14 gauge ) but will not suffer from "skin effect" since they are ALL "skin".

As to "smaller sounding better", i agree to a certain extent, especially on interconnects. Speaker cables are another matter ( and yes, i have tried this ). You just can't get the bass impact or control from a 20 gauge wire ( let alone the 26 gauge wire ) that you can out of a much heavier gauge. The use of high efficiency speakers that require less voltage / current to operate may make this more of a moot point though. For the record, i did my experimentation with a set of 96 db speakers and i still found "skinny" speaker wires lacking in "oomph".

I will agree that solid core is typically MUCH better, regardless of gauge. If you go back into the Asylum archives, you will find that i was a proponent of solid wire before they were even archiving the forums. Sean
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