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 1 response by stanwal

The consensus among the experts such as Martin Colloms or the designers at Audio Synthesis is that the speaker wires are the weaker link. I have found this to be true in my experience. Pierre Sprey at Mapleshade has the opposite opinion. I know Pierre and his opinion carries weight so I have ordered a pair of his speaker cables to see. The whole question may well be system dependent. As to the short cables causing tweeter damage, I have never heard this in 42 years in audio. It would seem to assume that(1) the amp would somehow be unstable without a sufficient length of wire to load it, or (2) that without a longer run of interconnect to attenuate the treble the signal would be too strong. Neither seems likely. Stan