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Testing speaker cable.
chung
Date: 7/26/2003 2:33 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:
normanstrong wrote:
Let's say you want to know if your speaker cable has any audible
effect on the sound you hear from the speaker. How would you run the
test, assuming that you do not intend to publish the results in some
prestigious journal? Here's how:
1. Test monophonically, using one speaker.
2. Connect the right and left cables together, end-to-end
3. Short out one of the lengths of cable, either at the speaker end
or the amp end. You're now listening to a single piece of cable with
the other cable shorted out of the circuit.
The believers can argue that how you "short" one of the cables could be
critical.
4. Simply undo the short, and your cable will now be 2x. If you
can't hear any difference between x feet and 2x feet, then you won't
hear anything from the first length of cable either. This assumes
that doubling the length of cable causes at least as much harm as the
original single length. This is a good assumption since the
resistance goes up linearly, and the reactance increases by the square
of the length.
Any objections?
The believers may argue that the effects of cable lengths only show up
in stereo listening, where imaging is important.
Wouldn't a simpler test be to just swap the left and right cables, if
those cables are different in length by a factor of 2? If there are no
detectible differences, then cable lengths, at least in the lengths
tested, don't matter, no?
Much simpler to read:
"Effects of cable, Loudspeaker and Amplifier Interactions", Davis, Fred E.,
JAES, vol. 39, no. 6 Jun 91,
He has R and L parameters of 10X and 20X differences with only a small response
variation in the high end. Nothing new has happened since then.
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