Is it a Myth: Equal Length Speaker Cables?

[Antipodes1553552706]

bull's wool

[mihilli]

What about having loops in your interconnects?

 

 

Antipodes;138834 wrote:

If one of your cables crosses itelf then you must have a loop. A loop in your speaker cable means you have formed an inductor with your speaker cable, which will act as a low pass filter, albeit one that kicks in at fairly high frequencies. But it will depend on your amp and speaker whether the effect is very audible.

 

 

 

In thinking about cables people tend to think of a signal travelling through a cable in the same way as water travels through a pipe, and so resistance is assumed to be important. That analogy would be more relevant if we were talking about DC, but we aren't, we are talking about a kind of AC signal, where capacitance and inductance become more important because these create a drag on the signal - a drag that varies with frequency.

 

 

 

A music signal travelling in a cable creates a field around it. The current flowing in the wire and the field are not able to be considered in isolation of each other. Change the current and you change the field. Change the field and change the current. This is why dielectric performance is important. Coil the wire up and the relationship between the field and the current in the cable is changed, the field created causing a greater drag on high frequencies. Which is why cable geometry is so important, and why geometry will screw with phase, and therefore dynamic linearity.

 

[davyboy9]

I presume the 'field effect' would follow the inverse square law.

[Luckiestmanalive]

Thanks, for the advice, Antipodes. I haven't tested whether or not there is an audible difference but I doubt I've done any harm by leading the offending speaker cable around the far side of my stand, around the front and into the near loudspeaker.

[Antipodes1553552706]

 

mihilli;138906 wrote:

What about having loops in your interconnects?

 

Also not good but less of an issue than with speaker cables.

[stuarth]

 

Antipodes;138931 wrote:

Also not good but less of an issue than with speaker cables.

 

How about power cables? I have a 2 metre aftermarket power cable (thanks Ernie) to my CD player which only needs to be half that length.

 

I have coiled it to reduce the length. Loop equals inductance coil equals not good, I guess.

 

I should snake the excess cable off to the side instead, right?

[pagez]

 

Antipodes;138888 wrote:

It does seem that anything within an inch of the cable can affect the sound - but that is just by ear

 

amazing how small the distance is... ill have to try something like this out to see whether my ears can pick it up

[wapfu]

Someone correct me here. Electrons travel at close to the speed of light - propagate at 70% of this down a copper wire. so near instantaneous?. So how does the ear know the difference in so small a time difference between 3 feet and 15? Surely wire gage has more to do with length.

[tanman_sg]

The little box I had to deal with jitter the other day made a neat difference to my DAC, even though it was regulating the timing by perhaps 0.00000000035 seconds. It seems possible that timing, even on such a small scale, will make a difference.

[Electra]

Possibly its not the timing, but the fact that all cables have parallel and series inductance, capacitance and resistance. Different cable lengths will mean that the amplifier is actually not connecting to the drivers exactly the same way. Add into this the fact that capacitance can also be frequency dependent, and therefore can create phase shifts at certain parts of the audio frequency spectrum, and you can get all sorts of odd behavior.

 

This is one of the scientifically provable reasons that some cables will image differently to others - as Mycenius and I experienced yesterday with 2 very well known interconnects, and speaker cables.