Recording Magazine
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message
Arny Krueger wrote:
While pieces of both 10 gauge and 24 gauge speaker wire
will carry signals up into the many MHz range with some
amount of attenuation depending on the application, the
10 gauge wire can possibly have audible losses due to
inductance and skin effect, while the 24 gauge wire can
have enough DC resistance and inductance to cause
audible losses. All you need to have audible losses is
the wrong length, the wrong physical configuration, and
the wrong speaker.
Sit down and do the numbers.
Of course I have.
Skin effect issues are
hardly even measurable in the audio range.
They are clearly measurable, partially because we can now do some pretty
incredible measurements.
They are not
a significant issue and they are another example of
audiophiles pulling things out of a hat to try and
explain things without doing the actual math to see what
significance the effect does.
Admittedly, it takes a really big wire (e.g. below 12 gauge) significant
cable lengths and low impedance speakers to have potentially audible
effects. But in the wild whacky world of high end audio - all things are
possible and many of them have actually seen the light of day, or at least
some stereo show some place.
And of course Litz wire isn't simply individually
insulated strands, but a special weave that brings each
strand periodically to the outer surface of the bunch.
Please educate me. Litz wire seems to have only
mechanical advantages. It obviously doesn't do anything
for skin effect, despite much audiophile lore.
The whole point of litz wire is to reduce skin effect
losses, by effectively reducing the diameter of each
conductor. That is why it is used in TV set sweep
circuit inductors and the like.
The modern equivalent of a CRT sweep circuit is the ubiquitous switchmode
power supply. Its been a dog's age since I saw one of those with litz wire
in it.
Litz wiring is a very
effective way to handle skin effect problems, but it is
superfluous for speaker cabling because skin effect
problems don't exist there. --scott
AFAIK litz wire is pretty much an historical artefact.
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