[George's Pro Sound Company]

"Paul Stamler" wrote in message
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"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
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"DeeAa" wrote in message


When you connect a pair of speakers with cables of
clearly different length, the speaker with longer cord
will be lower in volume.

But maybe not that much. A well-designed speaker cable will only have a
few tenths of a DB attenuation.

BTW we don't design speaker cables to control over-all attenuation, we
design speaker cables to provide good "damping", or IOW to minimize
having the speaker cable upset the frequency response of the speaker.

Well, yes and no.

"Damping" is part of the story -- additional resistance between the
amplifier output and the speaker will change the "Q" of the woofer, which
will change the frequency response. Usually more for a vented-box speaker,
less for a closed box.

But there's another issue. If you put additional resistance between the
amp and speaker, you're creating a voltage divider, with the series
element formed by the cable resistance (plus the amplifier's output
impedance, but these days that's usually negligible), and the shunt
element formed by the speaker's impedance. The latter is usually far from
flat, and with any appreciable resistance from the cable, you create a
response curve which follows the impedance curve of the speaker. Do that
with two speakers and different cable lengths, you'll get two different
response curves.

It's pretty academic when you're dealing with short runs in a control
room, as long as you use reasonably heavy cable (say 12 gauge). It's a
real issue when you're running, say, 50 or 100 feet of cable in an
auditorium. That's one reason it's nice to keep the amps as close to the
speakers as possible, and why people like active speakers, at least for
smaller applications.

Peace,
Paul
OTOH when you run speakers sometimes 600 feet apart like I do compareing
the volume to within even a few dB's is a waste of time as you will NEVER
be in the near feild of any two speakers at the same time
I would say this is true even with speakers just 100 feet apart
one will ALWAYS be dominant in your listening zone so who the hell cares,
make it sound good, head for catering
george