Long interconnect/short speaker cable or vice versa?
tmartin2 -- Sat, 07/30/2005 - 21:43
Assuming your equipment (other than power amp) is somewhat distant from your speakers, which is better: long interconnect/short speaker cable run or short interconnect/long speaker cable?
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I've have had better success with long interconnects.
I've also found that if you have monoblock amps and can use a very short run of speaker cable, the differences in speaker cables is significantly diminished.
Jim
+1 to ALL of Jim's comments. This is my experience also.
A good sense of humor makes it ALL sound better!
Posted: 30, Jan Mon 2006 12:36 pm Post subject:
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To address the question of long interconnects and short speaker cables, or short interconnects and long speaker cables, I definitely come down on the side of short speaker cables. They carry a much larger signal and are more prone to distortions. I've used 1' cables with monoblock power amplifiers.
I asked a cable designer that question and he said he thought everyone should use long interconnects and long speaker cables! (He was kidding, of course.)
Great question, one we at AQ get all the time.
The answer is simple: if you have a choice, go with short speaker cables and long interconnects every time. I have a very difficult time hearing the difference between a 1 meter interconnect and a 5 meter pair. Speaker cable? I can hear damn near every foot of it!
Cable (even ours!) is bad! Less is more!
My experience (I am a relative newbie) has been in favor of long cable. :D
I've read a technical article which describes why longer speaker cables would be better. However, in my own personal experience, I have found longer interconnects to be preferrable...
Sonic Spirits Inc.
http//www.sonicspirits.com
i am using 2 mc 275 amps in stereo mode bi wired to my 803D s the amps are connected using 10 foot 14 2 in wall speaker wire my vtl 2.5 is 25 feet away using 4 rca connectors converted to quad shield coax unbalanced ofcourse is this ok or is there a better way to achive better sound. without moving the preamp closer. any suggestions thank you
The in-wall speaker cable seems to be the weak link in the system. You should borrow some good speaker cables from your local dealer to try in the system. I bet that you'll be surprised at the difference.
Jim,
You are correct - if you use very short runs of speaker cable the effect of them is significantly diminished - it is why some manufacturers insist on minimum or preferred lengths.
Cables can be considered as an unavoidable "defective" part of the system, needed to connect its parts, and their effect should be minimized or they may become a positive part of our system and enhance it.
Many years ago I have tried using monoblocks and ESL63 with minimum (less than one feet) cables and (unhappily :-( ) always preferred the long cables.
All things being equal, it is MUCH better to have your high-level signal (Speaker wires) runs longer than your low level signal (Interconnect). It is not an opinion, it is simple physics. Think about it as a small weak stream vs. a river. Who has better chances to make it
Hi RoyPan -
I must politely disagree. Yes, there is significantly more current (flow) in speaker wires than in interconnects. The significant factor, though, is not the amount of current but rather the variation in electrical impedance between the source and the destination. Impedance variations are bad because as the impedance varies, so does the current flow and electrical phase angle. The source must work MUCH harder to provide an analogous voltage level when impedance varies.
When long interconnects are run, the impedance of the source and destination are relatively constant. When long speaker cables are run, by contrast, the speaker and its crossover vary (sometimes wildly) in impedance.
For this reason, it is better (at least in theory) to use long interconnects and to minimize the speaker cable length. You're free to disagree if you wish, but the comments I've made are (to the best of my knowledge) factual.
A good sense of humor makes it ALL sound better!
There is much more to consider then just variation in speaker XO impedance. Anyway, it is a complicated subject and I will leave it at that. For more information on the science behind wire I recommend Stephen Lampens book" Wire, Cable, Fiber optics" this book is written for audio engineers but still a good source for the lame man. It is available through Amazon.
Don't you sacrifice SPACE to properly maneuver for the sake of an alleged " sound enhancement " by shortening your interconnect cables... I did just that and now I'm literally paying for that blunder.
Some gear has their input/output jacks in awkward places, and my 1m-long interconnect cable that once dId its job before with gear X now doesn't reach gear Y's XLR outputs.
From now on, I will only purchase at least 2meter-long cables. Going behind my rack is dark, painful, full of sharp edges and nothing worse than a short interconnect to drive me nuts.
My speaker's cables ( Analysis Plus Silver ) have the same lenght ( 1,5m) of my interconnects ( Supra SWORD), from my HALO JC2 preamp to my Bel Canto REF 1000s monoblocks and from them to my DALI HELICON 400s.
Consider making the "long run "the IC going INTO your pre-amp as the signal level is generally higher than that going from pre-amp to amp.
To some extent, it depends on the amplifier design.
If you are using true balanced connections, then the component-to-component distance is theoretically not an issue. In a recording, you might have a microphone at one end of a large hall and the mixing desk at the other, or even further; balanced will have no problems coping with this, but a single-ended connection (if you could find such a thing in a recording) would lose signal integrity rapidly after about 13-15m. If you are using balanced connections, long interconnects and short speaker cables are highly recommended because of the interconnect's potential to run long lengths.
At the other extreme, if you are using a pot-in-a-box passive preamp, the shorter the interconnects the better, and long speaker cables are mandatory, because the signal losses when trying to pass the signal through a gain-free preamp is going to introduce noise quickly.
In between these polar opposites, the choice to some extent depends on the output impedance of one device and the input impedance of the other. If the output (source) impedance of one product is atypically high and the input (load) impedance of the next product in the chain is atypically low, separating the two with a long, capacitive single-ended interconnect is going to potentially wreck high frequency performance. In such a system, keeping interconnect cables below 1m would be deliver a better outcome.
Curiously, this manifests itself across continental fault-lines. Countries that are still brushing off the volcano dust right now tend to design amplifiers with short interconnects and long speaker cables in mind, where products designed in the US generally prefer to use shorter speaker cables with longer interconnects. There are exceptions of course.
Alan Sircom
Editor, Hi-Fi Plus Magazine
London, England
editor [at] hifiplus [dot] com