2. cables
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Whats wrong with short cables?

Hello Fellow Audionuts!!!!

Just curious....

Why should speaker cables be 8 feet and over? I hear that sometimes shorter cables can cause blown tweets and such during extended guitar solo's and stuff like that.

I always kinda assumed the shorter the run the better.

Im researching into building my own Pre, SS Amps, Speakers, and cables. I was planning on running a stereo amp pair for each speaker and bi-amping them. The amplifiers will be on thier own stands between the pre/cdp/tuner and the speaker. That means i will have a speaker cable run of probably less than 4 feet.

Would it be better to tailor the legnth of the cable to the distance needed? or would it be better to use a cable over 8 feet in legnth and just have it coiled behind the speaker?
slappy

Showing 4 responses by eldartford

eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Take your 2-foot speaker wires and wrap them tightly around a wad of $100 bills. The effect will be exactly like long expensive cables.
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Subaruguru...I vote for short cables, like 1 foot with the monoblock amp adjacent ro the speaker. However, if you have too-long cables that need to be tidied up, coiling them can be OK. First of all, the air-core inductor created by coiling several feet of cable would be of very low value...especially for the woofer signal which goes directly into a large inductor of the crossover network. Furthermore, for the perfectionist, you can coil the wire in the same configuration that non-inductive wirewound resistors are made. Make a large loop of all the wire you want to coil, and then wind the coiled (2-wire) loop. tightly.
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
somehow the notion that wires which impose damaging load on your amp, and need to be counteracted by a Zobel network, are good, is hard for me to accept.
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
sean...I just finished wiring up a pair of MTM speakers using flat rectangular wire, Nordost I think. Each speaker had 5 wires, two ends, with two conductors...that makes 40 wire ends to strip off Teflon insulation. You have to do this carefully with an Xacto knife: can't use a wire stripper. What a job! This stuff better sound good.
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