My missus said to me "let me get this straight, you spend over £1,000 on speaker cables because you can 'hear the difference' but you can't hear me calling you from the kitchen" 😁
My God I wish everybody could make a video like Paul....... perfectly clear not talking too fast English not talking too slow no stupid music in the background just all very clear ...
If anyone still is asking that question to themselves, even after watching this video - I would think it would be easy to check for yourselves. Run a strong signal at high volumes. Move your cables closer together and vice versa. Put them on the ground and lift them off the ground. Can you hear any difference?
Paul, I've only discovered your video's for the last month or so, and they are very informative. I do accept what I can believe from my electronic and biomedical engineering experiences. I've been an audio nut over the last 50 years, and enjoyed it greatly. I do want to point out that this video had some "snake oil" in it. This came when you showed and described your hi-tech speaker cables. The snake oil is assuming that the floors in all homes are at earth ground. This is rarely if ever the case.(unless you are on a concrete floor in a basement or a slab home.) Standing your speaker cable ground side down on the carpeting makes no difference from the signal side down, since neither are near a true or any type of ground that you are assuming is present. Flipping the cable over on the carpeting will make no difference in the sound reproduction, go ahead and try.Then repeat it on a concrete floor to see if there is a difference that can be heard, it's the only real way to test if the cable orientation does make a difference when in the presence of a ground potential. Shielding adds another dimension to the equation. Best Regards, frank..
Hello. In my country, the houses have concrete floors. I live on the 1st floor. My speaker cables were resting on the floor. Do I have to change something?
i am searching a treatment for a sound disorder, i believe what you explained has a great value that medicine must understand to solve some mystery of some medical conditions. (i am an engineer). thank you
I have decent cables and try to keep the power away from everything, but with a system under 4k thats not really as much of a concern. One thing i found was 6" RCA cables which really helped clean things up. They were a bit spendy for me as they are directional etc but really cleaned things up. I put the power conditioner on an upper shelf which really helped with the power cables. Biggest benifit? It cleaned up the wiring, no change in sound.
I run individual conduits, with shielded cable to each component, with explosion proof fittings filled with chico just to be safe, then set an isolation transformer, set a panel with an isolated ground, run a 20 amp circuit in 10 gauge wire to each 110v component with an ig receptacle, run a ground ring around the entire listening area bonding every metal part in the room to eliminate any potential, finally, I put on a chain male suit made of oxygen free copper which I bond to the ground ring with an alligator clip. Then it's time to rock baby!
This question raised some interesting thoughts for this electrician. For high voltage wires, you have to deal with the power factor. And to adjust the power factor, the distance between wires becomes relevant because properly spaced they act like a capacitor. Maybe at the voltages most audio equipment operate in this is not relevant, but another path towards making a system "more perfect".
One can only imagine the ridiculous cost of the flat cable you showed. If one has lots of cash to throw at the wind, there's plenty of sucker items you can be talked into. With all the cables coming out of your components at the rear of your set-up, it's virtually impossible to not have some crossing/touching each other. Best rule is if you don't hear a problem, then what is there to fix?
This totally answered my question, as I almost damaged my new home theater system speakers by having all the wires together, coming from the rear and then together with the front speakers, so that I could keep them neat, lol. The feedback was horrendous.
The longer I live, the more I think the whole wire thing is a marketing con. I have bought several reasonably expensive interconnects and speaker cables (IXOS, Cardis, Furutech) to hear very marginal differences. Certainly not worth the thousands spent. The only cables I can honestly say I have heard an appreciable difference on is Furutech power cables. Which is the last thing I expected to hear, but tried them anyway.
Thank you, I offer my condenses on the loss of Arnie, he will be missed. I recently lost my dog who has been my buddy for many years, that may not compare, but I am having a hard time dealing with it. I hope you can deal with your loss.
The speakers cables I use can't be bought in a store, a friend of mine who is an electronic by trade made them just for fun and testing. Same kind of cable you would find in the walls of a house. We went for the thickest ones that we could put banana plugs on. They are shielded from here to kingdom come 😂 and does not take away anything from the sound. I would say they are better than a lot of experience fancy cables.
In most systems it doesn't really matter all that much and you probably won't hear any difference, with a few important things to watch out for... You really don't want power cables for instance, running right next to your speaker and/or interconnect cables because those lower signal cables will pick up AC hum from the power line... Plus you really don't want your speaker wires running right next to your line level interconnects either, but AC power ones are worst... What I always do is try to as much as possible, separate all of my power cables from my speaker cables, from my line level interconnect cables, in at least those 3 separate groups, that way the interference is considerably less than if you were to just bundle everything together for "neatness"... Most of the time I really don't bother to go any further than that basic separation, simply because my stereo system has a LOT of components in it and going into any further detail would be WAY too much trouble for the very minor further improvement I might gain beyond separating the wires into any more than the aforementioned three separate basic groups... You can definitely go to extremes with this if you are really crazy about it, but to not much additional sonic benefit beyond what I mentioned above.
Hi you talking about keeping speaker cables of the ground the frequency of audio is so low down and below the radio spectrum it wont make any difference if it is a few feet of the ground for instance a long wave radio aerial to reduce the effect of the earth,s capacitance would have to be many 100,s of above ground and audio is below the long wave spectrum.
i use fat loudspeaker cable, but i don’t lift it up from the floor. I can not bundle it, than i hear distortion. When i lay it free, than is all ok. The loudspeaker cable i use is fat, it do not fit on the loudspeaker connections, i have put golden forks on the cable so it can be screw on my loudspeakers.
All that about cables acting as an antenna is true, but so du the rest of your system, the cabinets, metal audio racks, metal on the speaker drivers and so on! My suggestion is to losen a screw on every metal unit you have, mount a ground cable between them all, but do not let that ground cable go to the outlet.
@@gordthor5351 Yes you are right, the better solution would maybe be to cover each unit with a metal shield. But we are out in strange solutions now:-)
Agree, enjoying this series by the way. Alien crosstalk and capacitive coupling are greatly reducing by proper screening/shielding, great advice! Electromagnetic coupling is another beast onto itself, but as you say- keep the power away from signal and your prob. fine.
The wire phenomenon has always raised many questions for me. I understand why you would keep power wires from speaker wire (magnetic field, especially when coiled up) but I still am not quite sure why a heavy Guage wire from my amp to my speaker creates better sound because when I look inside of the speaker cabinet there is small unshielded wire.
It won;t sound better. There is no mystical change that happens within the speaker. As such there really is no point using speaker wire better than the wire in the speaker cabinet or in the amp
The wire in the speaker can be say 18 gauge because the run is so short. Longer runs increase resistance which is mitigated by heavier wire. Up to say 20 feet I go with 16 gauge. 20-40feet 14 gauge. More than that 12 gauge. As a ridiculous example a 100 foot speaker cable of 18 gauge driving a 4 ohm load would see a loss of 2.5 dB of signal. That's almost half the power of the amp being lost as heat along the cable! Not a good thing.
jude noble. Speaker cables are the one exception. You have to use low resistance speaker cables, which means thick cables, otherwise your signal will be dissipated as heat. The speaker manufacturer might use thin cables but that’s not a good reason to do the same.
More Resistance between your amp and speaker reduces the potential control the amp can have over the speaker. The heavy moving mass of a subwoofer for example :creates back emf ( a competing/interfering signal).. more resistance allows the woofer to resonate/move more the way IT wants. You can change your bass response by changing the wire size/ resistance. Thick wire= tighter/punchier/thinner (more controlled) bass Thinner wire= thicker, more rumble, louder and boomier, loosens up the bass. You can guess which audiophiles tend to prefer.. but often in speaker design big cost effective pro speakers which might have overly tight drivers and lack some warm bass extension, purposely use thin wire to round out the bottom end.... for say better DJ use...I could go on...and on Edit-note: tube amps have higher resistance to start with ...
I have over 40 systems connected to one receiver and two television with one of those being a CRT. If you have shielded cabling then it doesn't really matter. I have yet to see interference in video and audio cables but say, my atari 2600 being unshielded? I see interference but thats mostly because of the 6 antennas I live nearby and makes it impossible to have wireless speakers.
How many floors in houses "act like ground"? You have to give me a better reason than that for me to lift my speaker cables off the "wooden" floor (not conductive ground). Maybe there is a good reason, but I'm not buying that one.
Greetings, Ah, good lad. Smart lad. He is selling some snake oil in this video. Don't buy any of it! In the early 1980's, high-end speaker cables were beginning to appear on the market. Some of the product claims were totally unbelievable and had prices to match. And, the nonsense is still being foisted on us today. Audio cable must be burned or run-in for a 100 hours. The best cable is cryogenically treated. Audio cables are directional. They must be supported off the floor via insulators. They have damping factors. They must be 'conditioned' to keep the wire molecularly aligned. Ad nauseam. It is all snake-oil designed to part the naive buyer from his money. It is all a crock! The ONLY factor that affects performance of audio cables is the wire gauge for a particular maximum distance between amplifier and speakers at a particular Ohm rating. If you have the proper gauge, all audio cable will sound exactly the same! "Realizing that wire resistance was the critical factor in speaker wire, Gordon Gow, then President of McIntosh Laboratory, still a maker of world-class high fidelity amplifiers, used a speaker cable demonstration to show there was no listening difference between high-end audio cables and plain line cord (14 AWG lamp cord wire). Fifty-foot lengths of wire were used in the blind comparison. The setup consisted of a master control relay box and two slave relay boxes. A three-position switch was used to select one of three different speaker cables of equal length. One was common line cord. The other two cables were from popular high-end manufacturers. 8-ohm speakers were selected for the test. The two other brand name cables were heavier than the line cord. The test proved his point. No one could hear ANY DIFFERENCES using several different 8-ohm speaker systems." -- from Speaker Wire, A History by Roger Russell. (Former Director of Acoustic Research at McIntosh Laboratories, 1970s to 1992)
Its all about the relative relativeness of things, you could argue one cable seperated by a mile to another cable will interfere, the question is to what extent and will it effect sound quality, in my humble opinion, using an average £10 phono cable will not interfere with another low signal cable enough to notice, but I would keep the low signal cables away from mains and speaker cables. Current carrying cables induce Magnetic fields; low signal cables have extremely low current and therefore the Ampere-turns value is insignificant to non-existant by even advanced measurement equipment. BTW: This is only my humble opinion).
The ribbon cables that You presented seem to be organized in quite interesting way. I suppose they are simmetrical in a way that wires up and down are mixed. In case of such flat wide multicores.it may equal some small unwanted currents induced from each to other . I suppose the reason of such multicore connection is that it deminishes skin effect and decreases stiffness of wires . Good idea. In my case I located all wires up and down (which are quite special but made not for audio purpose) all the way in a distance more than 5 cm anyway not much more due to "complication of life". My observation is that more than 5 cm doesnt make more change in my speakers.
Wait wait wait... skin effect? In a speaker wire? Since when do speakers play GHz and above sound bands? When did this happen? Home audio is so weird... in car audio we run thousands of watts with no gaps. The only things we keep apart are power-signal-speaker. But speaker wires are all +&- together. Subwoofer power is the only exception. No one makes 4G and above pairs.
@@awdadwadwad1723 and here we have an uneducated person dropping in their 2 cents while having no idea what they are talking about. There are some very Hi-Res car audio systems out there with DACs and processors on par with alot of hi-end amps.
2 errors found, negligence & confound again. Correction. Shielding does good without being grounded. You get antenna effect already when grounding only one side of the cable, if you ground both sides you can get ground loop noise.
Where should the speaker amp be over a distance from source. Long preamp Short power cable. Short preamp long power cable. Restated. The last power stage next to speaker por near the source
Your videos are always so good, never mind some of the stupid people that make stupid comments. Please continue educating the rest of us. I will visit your store and buy a system from you. (the most affordable of course) Thank you
from my lisetening experience over 40 years even shielded cables should stay away from each other .there are still distortions on the perfect symetry .....
Two quick rules to avoid getting duped; 1) does established electronics science support some arbitrary theory claiming that one sort of product makes a measurable difference to the output, i.e. can instruments or your ear consistently measure a difference; 2) can you personally detect problems that diminish the audio quality, and does swapping any single connector, raising any group of cables, etc, remove that problem? I actually wonder about the era since the M cable brand appeared, to "fix" issues old timers had never experienced, especially when I got instant hum from their modest-price cable, then entirely removed it with even cheaper Radio Shack cables. Were they intentionally making problem cables to upsell their more expensive versions? Buyers beware in audio, just as in cars and vinyl siding. A third rule might be to immediately get away from any "expert" the instant he does NOT disown garbage like balancing tuning rocks, or treating CDs with magic chemicals - anything that defies all current knowledge. Last, floors are NOT "the ground." Cables do not conduct or gather any induction from wood, carpet, linoleum, or cement, other than static - which is why you do not separate them from that surface. Power cords running parallel might affect speaker or connector cables, but again, why not actually play Devil's advocate and intentionally do what they warn against, and see if you even hear issues then? If not, certainly those can be permanently ruled out as areas for concern.
You say we have to raise the speaker cable off the ground to avoid the ground connection, but you also say we have to shield our cables and thus isolate them with ground! Both cannot be right!
All the fuss people make about cables. Look inside any amplifier, the wires are thin, and extremely close to each other, why does cabling suddenly not matter once it is inside the amp? Look inside lots of speakers and the cabling is very basic inside. But the worst are high end power cables. People readily ignore the miles of shoddy cable all the way to the power plant and their homes internal wiring but somehow think the last meter is going to make all the difference. Its ludicrous and shows limited understandings of electronics. Take off the cover from your amp and see how the wire goes from tiny wires in all directions to your high end cable and imagine really whether that cable is making a difference. Call it what it is. High end cable and power connections are for looks only (which btw I think is a fair reason for using them). Not for sound
@jude noble. Well, to the contrary, well build amplifiers use quite heavy gauge speaker wiring from the output devices to the binding posts. Additionally, many use some sort of filtering arrangement prior to the signal arriving at the binding posts. Just a quick look at the internals of a Meridian 557 power amp here: www.meridian-audio.info/viewphoto.php?compid=143&photoid=3531 Amplifiers that are capable of delivering serious current to your speakers (if those are demanding it, i.e. low impedance and low efficiency ), do have to use suitably heavy gauge cable so these 'bursts'of high current can reach the speakers comfortably, and.... ...as for the shielded power cables, the task of such a cable is to avoid 'adding' any kind of EMI ( electromagnetic interference) to the length of cable between the wall socket and the component it supplies power to. Whatever has come from the "shoddy cable all the way from the power plant" is not relevant, be that as it may. The task is NOT to add any more from all the electromagnetic fields that surround any sound system with all those (internal ) power transformers radiating it. Some audiophiles go all the way installing a dedicated power line and circuit braker for their sound systems and, I can testify, it makes a difference. I have heard it many times and in different situations.
Leporello Gatos Well you are right to an extent. Indeed I've seen amps where they use silver wire instead of copper. But I don't see how that justifies spending £500 plus on speaker cables. By all means get some 10 AWG speaker wires but theres no need to spend more than £30 on those. Perhaps I should have said, there's not much point getting wiring significantly 'better' than the amp or speakers internal wiring. In regards to shielding. OK that makes sense. BUT shielding is not complicated. It can be done very easily DIY and certainly doesn't warrant money over $40-50. Just get your normal power cable. Shield it then over the shielding put a braided sleeve and that is all you have to do
@jude noble Thanks for your response. Speaker cables are not created equal :) Materials used, construction method and the geometry of the conductors set inside the jacket, all have an effect on the electrical characteristics of a cable. Some are intentionally built to present a capacitive link between the amp and the load ( Naim cables for example), while others avoid that by having a different geometrical construction, which makes the cable have also different electrical characteristics. Then of course, it's the materials used for the conductors, with silver of high purity being the choice of many 'high end' manufacturers which, to a point, justify somewhat higher prices. Paul in his videos is showning a cable, specially made for him, that would be very time consuming to construct and therefore, could be priced accordingly. Having said all this though, I do take your point about prices. When I see cables costing $ xx,xxx I cannot help but think "snake oil" ; ) ...and there's plenty of that in this industry IMHO.
Yeah, I definitely get where you're coming from. I think in the audiophile community there should be more encouragement to DIY cables as you can make a high quality cable with not too much difficulty. Very high end cables can be complicated which DIY would not be appropriate for the average listener. But these high end cables really will only start to make a real difference when paired with high end amps and speakers. I guess when I get annoyed is where people are persuaded into spending $1000 on cables when their amp is worth maybe 3000 and speakers 3000 again. If you have a pair of wilson Alexx's and a suitable amp then yeah I can see that kind of money justified on cables, but in most cases, I think there are better things you can spend money on to improve your sound (room treatment, vinyl cleaners, better DAC, better amp, etc....)
Absolutely! I often argue with some other members of the local Audio Club that, relocating your speakers has a much more dramatic effect in what we hear, than the addition of an exotic and grossly overpriced speaker cable. Thanks for the chat!
Power line from the power station to your home are not shield so why by shield cable to go from you amp to the power socket????????????????????????????????? .
Route power cables away from signal cables, other than that insignificant diff. Like raising speaker cables off the floor, very stupid. Nothing but placebo. The more power that runs thru a wire the stronger the electromagnetic field. For a 120v power cord it dissipates within inches from the cord. 90%,ok benefit of doubt, 70% of hi end audio is placebo.
"You probably don't want to have the cables touching each other. You want to have a little bit of separation." NO, that's sheer SUPERSTITION. At audio frequencies it makes NO PERCEPTIBLE DIFFERENCE how close shielded, insulated audio signal cables are draped next to each other.
With power and speaker cables next to each other i've very rarely had interference, and if i did it was minor. Cleaning up the cable pile can help. But usually power and speaker cables are no problem at all. However! If you use unshielded rca interconnects, especially thin cheap ones, you are bound to have a problem somewhere down the line if you have the rest of cabling all piled and bunched up behind your gear. Replacing those rca cables with fairly decent shielded ones fixed those problems. Combined with just a little cable management and you get it to look a bit neater as well. So it's not complete BS.
sheilding the power cables has a downside .it makes the sound "stresed" not engaging musically.its better to use stranded helix configuration cables as live or natural and keep the "grounding"wires seperated.and by the way paul foils like mg cables use are the best way to ground your system .i use 5 cm foil to each device with 40 cm foil all copper to the main grounding my power cables are duelund tinned copper strands with cotton sleeving .i have pitch black .no noises at all on my line.
Keeping any cable's as far away from my wife really helps keep the noise floor down
Chris Goodman wins the Internets! 🏆
The famous WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor).
My missus said to me "let me get this straight, you spend over £1,000 on speaker cables because you can 'hear the difference' but you can't hear me calling you from the kitchen" 😁
My God I wish everybody could make a video like Paul....... perfectly clear not talking too fast English not talking too slow no stupid music in the background just all very clear ...
If anyone still is asking that question to themselves, even after watching this video - I would think it would be easy to check for yourselves. Run a strong signal at high volumes. Move your cables closer together and vice versa. Put them on the ground and lift them off the ground. Can you hear any difference?
Thanks for all the videos you post for all of us audio lovers! Very useful information Paul.
Paul,
I've only discovered your video's for the last month or so, and they are very informative. I do accept what I can believe from my electronic and biomedical engineering experiences. I've been an audio nut over the last 50 years, and enjoyed it greatly. I do want to point out that this video had some "snake oil" in it. This came when you showed and described your hi-tech speaker cables. The snake oil is assuming that the floors in all homes are at earth ground. This is rarely if ever the case.(unless you are on a concrete floor in a basement or a slab home.) Standing your speaker cable ground side down on the carpeting makes no difference from the signal side down, since neither are near a true or any type of ground that you are assuming is present. Flipping the cable over on the carpeting will make no difference in the sound reproduction, go ahead and try.Then repeat it on a concrete floor to see if there is a difference that can be heard, it's the only real way to test if the cable orientation does make a difference when in the presence of a ground potential. Shielding adds another dimension to the equation.
Best Regards,
frank..
Hello. In my country, the houses have concrete floors. I live on the 1st floor. My speaker cables were resting on the floor. Do I have to change something?
Great, another aspect of audio I haven't obsessed about in awhile. ;)
I love these videos, I have learnt so much.......
i am searching a treatment for a sound disorder, i believe what you explained has a great value that medicine must understand to solve some mystery of some medical conditions. (i am an engineer). thank you
I have decent cables and try to keep the power away from everything, but with a system under 4k thats not really as much of a concern. One thing i found was 6" RCA cables which really helped clean things up. They were a bit spendy for me as they are directional etc but really cleaned things up. I put the power conditioner on an upper shelf which really helped with the power cables. Biggest benifit? It cleaned up the wiring, no change in sound.
I run individual conduits, with shielded cable to each component, with explosion proof fittings filled with chico just to be safe, then set an isolation transformer, set a panel with an isolated ground, run a 20 amp circuit in 10 gauge wire to each 110v component with an ig receptacle, run a ground ring around the entire listening area bonding every metal part in the room to eliminate any potential, finally, I put on a chain male suit made of oxygen free copper which I bond to the ground ring with an alligator clip. Then it's time to rock baby!
HaHa!!
Hahahah!! Love it
Brilliant!
@Todd Brand
🤘💀🤘
This question raised some interesting thoughts for this electrician. For high voltage wires, you have to deal with the power factor. And to adjust the power factor, the distance between wires becomes relevant because properly spaced they act like a capacitor. Maybe at the voltages most audio equipment operate in this is not relevant, but another path towards making a system "more perfect".
One can only imagine the ridiculous cost of the flat cable you showed. If one has lots of cash to throw at the wind, there's plenty of sucker items you can be talked into. With all the cables coming out of your components at the rear of your set-up, it's virtually impossible to not have some crossing/touching each other. Best rule is if you don't hear a problem, then what is there to fix?
I always learn something! Cracking video. Ta very much. God bless.
This totally answered my question, as I almost damaged my new home theater system speakers by having all the wires together, coming from the rear and then together with the front speakers, so that I could keep them neat, lol. The feedback was horrendous.
The longer I live, the more I think the whole wire thing is a marketing con. I have bought several reasonably expensive interconnects and speaker cables (IXOS, Cardis, Furutech) to hear very marginal differences. Certainly not worth the thousands spent. The only cables I can honestly say I have heard an appreciable difference on is Furutech power cables. Which is the last thing I expected to hear, but tried them anyway.
This brings up another interesting question: would it help to have the speaker cables shielded?
Thank you, I offer my condenses on the loss of Arnie, he will be missed. I recently lost my dog who has been my buddy for many years, that may not compare, but I am having a hard time dealing with it. I hope you can deal with your loss.
NO NO
The speakers cables I use can't be bought in a store, a friend of mine who is an electronic by trade made them just for fun and testing.
Same kind of cable you would find in the walls of a house. We went for the thickest ones that we could put banana plugs on. They are shielded from here to kingdom come 😂 and does not take away anything from the sound. I would say they are better than a lot of experience fancy cables.
How can shielding restrict the dynamics? That is crap.
shomolya. That is nonsense. The capacitance of a shield is far too low to have any effect on a speaker cable.
In most systems it doesn't really matter all that much and you probably won't hear any difference, with a few important things to watch out for... You really don't want power cables for instance, running right next to your speaker and/or interconnect cables because those lower signal cables will pick up AC hum from the power line... Plus you really don't want your speaker wires running right next to your line level interconnects either, but AC power ones are worst... What I always do is try to as much as possible, separate all of my power cables from my speaker cables, from my line level interconnect cables, in at least those 3 separate groups, that way the interference is considerably less than if you were to just bundle everything together for "neatness"... Most of the time I really don't bother to go any further than that basic separation, simply because my stereo system has a LOT of components in it and going into any further detail would be WAY too much trouble for the very minor further improvement I might gain beyond separating the wires into any more than the aforementioned three separate basic groups... You can definitely go to extremes with this if you are really crazy about it, but to not much additional sonic benefit beyond what I mentioned above.
Hi you talking about keeping speaker cables of the ground the frequency of audio is so low down and below the radio spectrum it wont make any difference if it is a few feet of the ground for instance a long wave radio aerial to reduce the effect of the earth,s capacitance would have to be many 100,s of above ground and audio is below the long wave spectrum.
i use fat loudspeaker cable, but i don’t lift it up from the floor. I can not bundle it, than i hear distortion. When i lay it free, than is all ok. The loudspeaker cable i use is fat, it do not fit on the loudspeaker connections, i have put golden forks on the cable so it can be screw on my loudspeakers.
All that about cables acting as an antenna is true, but so du the rest of your system, the cabinets, metal audio racks, metal on the speaker drivers and so on!
My suggestion is to losen a screw on every metal unit you have, mount a ground cable between them all, but do not let that ground cable go to the outlet.
Fried Mule That is easier said than done when at least the amp is grounded to the earth pin and star ground is also to the chassis.
@@gordthor5351 Yes you are right, the better solution would maybe be to cover each unit with a metal shield. But we are out in strange solutions now:-)
Agree, enjoying this series by the way. Alien crosstalk and capacitive coupling are greatly reducing by proper screening/shielding, great advice! Electromagnetic coupling is another beast onto itself, but as you say- keep the power away from signal and your prob. fine.
I predicted that raising cables is cos of the field around the cable. That prediction is supported by Paul.
When u say off the ground i assume were talking off the floor rt ? Just checking .
The wire phenomenon has always raised many questions for me. I understand why you would keep power wires from speaker wire (magnetic field, especially when coiled up) but I still am not quite sure why a heavy Guage wire from my amp to my speaker creates better sound because when I look inside of the speaker cabinet there is small unshielded wire.
It won;t sound better. There is no mystical change that happens within the speaker. As such there really is no point using speaker wire better than the wire in the speaker cabinet or in the amp
The wire in the speaker can be say 18 gauge because the run is so short. Longer runs increase resistance which is mitigated by heavier wire. Up to say 20 feet I go with 16 gauge. 20-40feet 14 gauge. More than that 12 gauge. As a ridiculous example a 100 foot speaker cable of 18 gauge driving a 4 ohm load would see a loss of 2.5 dB of signal. That's almost half the power of the amp being lost as heat along the cable! Not a good thing.
jude noble. Speaker cables are the one exception. You have to use low resistance speaker cables, which means thick cables, otherwise your signal will be dissipated as heat. The speaker manufacturer might use thin cables but that’s not a good reason to do the same.
More Resistance between your amp and speaker reduces the potential control the amp can have over the speaker. The heavy moving mass of a subwoofer for example :creates back emf ( a competing/interfering signal).. more resistance allows the woofer to resonate/move more the way IT wants. You can change your bass response by changing the wire size/ resistance. Thick wire= tighter/punchier/thinner (more controlled) bass
Thinner wire= thicker, more rumble, louder and boomier, loosens up the bass.
You can guess which audiophiles tend to prefer.. but often in speaker design big cost effective pro speakers which might have overly tight drivers and lack some warm bass extension, purposely use thin wire to round out the bottom end.... for say better DJ use...I could go on...and on
Edit-note: tube amps have higher resistance to start with ...
I have over 40 systems connected to one receiver and two television with one of those being a CRT. If you have shielded cabling then it doesn't really matter. I have yet to see interference in video and audio cables but say, my atari 2600 being unshielded? I see interference but thats mostly because of the 6 antennas I live nearby and makes it impossible to have wireless speakers.
I heard if you have 2 cables running in same direction then a put 90 degree in 1 of cables to deferent Component you eliminate the electric field???
I work on guitar tube amps, and Crossing cables at 90° does seem to work for managing fields
Won’t the shield reflect back the escaping signals into the original signal, causing interference internally?
This is why you use balanced cables when you use grounded shields. As the interference is accounted for and removed at the destination circuitry
How many floors in houses "act like ground"? You have to give me a better reason than that for me to lift my speaker cables off the "wooden" floor (not conductive ground). Maybe there is a good reason, but I'm not buying that one.
Greetings, Ah, good lad. Smart lad. He is selling some snake oil in this video. Don't buy any of it!
In the early 1980's, high-end speaker cables were beginning to appear on the market. Some of the product claims were totally unbelievable and had prices to match. And, the nonsense is still being foisted on us today.
Audio cable must be burned or run-in for a 100 hours. The best cable is cryogenically treated. Audio cables are directional. They must be supported off the floor via insulators. They have damping factors. They must be 'conditioned' to keep the wire molecularly aligned. Ad nauseam. It is all snake-oil designed to part the naive buyer from his money. It is all a crock!
The ONLY factor that affects performance of audio cables is the wire gauge for a particular maximum distance between amplifier and speakers at a particular Ohm rating. If you have the proper gauge, all audio cable will sound exactly the same!
"Realizing that wire resistance was the critical factor in speaker wire, Gordon Gow, then President of McIntosh Laboratory, still a maker of world-class high fidelity amplifiers, used a speaker cable demonstration to show there was no listening difference between high-end audio cables and plain line cord (14 AWG lamp cord wire).
Fifty-foot lengths of wire were used in the blind comparison. The setup consisted of a master control relay box and two slave relay boxes. A three-position switch was used to select one of three different speaker cables of equal length. One was common line cord. The other two cables were from popular high-end manufacturers. 8-ohm speakers were selected for the test. The two other brand name cables were heavier than the line cord. The test proved his point. No one could hear ANY DIFFERENCES using several different 8-ohm speaker systems." -- from Speaker Wire, A History by Roger Russell. (Former Director of Acoustic Research at McIntosh Laboratories, 1970s to 1992)
I try to keep all my cables as far away from each other it's possible.
Its all about the relative relativeness of things, you could argue one cable seperated by a mile to another cable will interfere, the question is to what extent and will it effect sound quality, in my humble opinion, using an average £10 phono cable will not interfere with another low signal cable enough to notice, but I would keep the low signal cables away from mains and speaker cables.
Current carrying cables induce Magnetic fields; low signal cables have extremely low current and therefore the Ampere-turns value is insignificant to non-existant by even advanced measurement equipment.
BTW: This is only my humble opinion).
The ribbon cables that You presented seem to be organized in quite interesting way. I suppose they are simmetrical in a way that wires up and down are mixed. In case of such flat wide multicores.it may equal some small unwanted currents induced from each to other . I suppose the reason of such multicore connection is that it deminishes skin effect and decreases stiffness of wires . Good idea. In my case I located all wires up and down (which are quite special but made not for audio purpose) all the way in a distance more than 5 cm anyway not much more due to "complication of life". My observation is that more than 5 cm doesnt make more change in my speakers.
Wait wait wait... skin effect? In a speaker wire? Since when do speakers play GHz and above sound bands? When did this happen?
Home audio is so weird... in car audio we run thousands of watts with no gaps. The only things we keep apart are power-signal-speaker. But speaker wires are all +&- together. Subwoofer power is the only exception. No one makes 4G and above pairs.
Well car audio is always sh1t quality, so maybe that's why you are running it like that.
@@awdadwadwad1723 and here we have an uneducated person dropping in their 2 cents while having no idea what they are talking about. There are some very Hi-Res car audio systems out there with DACs and processors on par with alot of hi-end amps.
@@liamcooper5202 alone that you are sitting in 1 meter on 2 cage makes it inferior, no matter how much DACs you throw in there xD
@@awdadwadwad1723 distance just makes it harder to setup doesnt mean you can not get a correct stage imaging and sound quality that is on par.
ah bless, i didn't know there was a little Nipper, he's so sweet
2 errors found, negligence & confound again.
Correction.
Shielding does good without being grounded.
You get antenna effect already when grounding only one side of the cable, if you ground both sides you can get ground loop noise.
Where should the speaker amp be over a distance from source. Long preamp Short power cable. Short preamp long power cable. Restated. The last power stage next to speaker por near the source
Cable Capacitance can change the sound nothing else will.
Your videos are always so good, never mind some of the stupid people that make stupid comments. Please continue educating the rest of us. I will visit your store and buy a system from you. (the most affordable of course) Thank you
from my lisetening experience over 40 years even shielded cables should stay away from each other .there are still distortions on the perfect symetry .....
i want shielding!
i dont know about you but my listening area isnt on the dirt floor(ground), so elevating the speaker cables is pure balony.
i'm sure there is a static electricity argument for that
By ground he means the earth, so your kitchen floor also.
Two quick rules to avoid getting duped; 1) does established electronics science support some arbitrary theory claiming that one sort of product makes a measurable difference to the output, i.e. can instruments or your ear consistently measure a difference; 2) can you personally detect problems that diminish the audio quality, and does swapping any single connector, raising any group of cables, etc, remove that problem? I actually wonder about the era since the M cable brand appeared, to "fix" issues old timers had never experienced, especially when I got instant hum from their modest-price cable, then entirely removed it with even cheaper Radio Shack cables. Were they intentionally making problem cables to upsell their more expensive versions? Buyers beware in audio, just as in cars and vinyl siding. A third rule might be to immediately get away from any "expert" the instant he does NOT disown garbage like balancing tuning rocks, or treating CDs with magic chemicals - anything that defies all current knowledge. Last, floors are NOT "the ground." Cables do not conduct or gather any induction from wood, carpet, linoleum, or cement, other than static - which is why you do not separate them from that surface. Power cords running parallel might affect speaker or connector cables, but again, why not actually play Devil's advocate and intentionally do what they warn against, and see if you even hear issues then? If not, certainly those can be permanently ruled out as areas for concern.
what's the point of shielded cables if you have to separate the cables? hmmm
You say we have to raise the speaker cable off the ground to avoid the ground connection, but you also say we have to shield our cables and thus isolate them with ground!
Both cannot be right!
All the fuss people make about cables. Look inside any amplifier, the wires are thin, and extremely close to each other, why does cabling suddenly not matter once it is inside the amp? Look inside lots of speakers and the cabling is very basic inside. But the worst are high end power cables. People readily ignore the miles of shoddy cable all the way to the power plant and their homes internal wiring but somehow think the last meter is going to make all the difference. Its ludicrous and shows limited understandings of electronics.
Take off the cover from your amp and see how the wire goes from tiny wires in all directions to your high end cable and imagine really whether that cable is making a difference.
Call it what it is. High end cable and power connections are for looks only (which btw I think is a fair reason for using them). Not for sound
@jude noble.
Well, to the contrary, well build amplifiers use quite heavy gauge speaker wiring from the output devices to the binding posts. Additionally, many use some sort of filtering arrangement prior to the signal arriving at the binding posts. Just a quick look at the internals of a Meridian 557 power amp here:
www.meridian-audio.info/viewphoto.php?compid=143&photoid=3531
Amplifiers that are capable of delivering serious current to your speakers (if those are demanding it, i.e. low impedance and low efficiency ), do have to use suitably heavy gauge cable so these 'bursts'of high current can reach the speakers comfortably, and....
...as for the shielded power cables, the task of such a cable is to avoid 'adding' any kind of EMI ( electromagnetic interference) to the length of cable between the wall socket and the component it supplies power to. Whatever has come from the "shoddy cable all the way from the power plant" is not relevant, be that as it may.
The task is NOT to add any more from all the electromagnetic fields that surround any sound system with all those (internal ) power transformers radiating it.
Some audiophiles go all the way installing a dedicated power line and circuit braker for their sound systems and, I can testify, it makes a difference.
I have heard it many times and in different situations.
Leporello Gatos Well you are right to an extent. Indeed I've seen amps where they use silver wire instead of copper. But I don't see how that justifies spending £500 plus on speaker cables. By all means get some 10 AWG speaker wires but theres no need to spend more than £30 on those. Perhaps I should have said, there's not much point getting wiring significantly 'better' than the amp or speakers internal wiring.
In regards to shielding. OK that makes sense. BUT shielding is not complicated. It can be done very easily DIY and certainly doesn't warrant money over $40-50. Just get your normal power cable. Shield it then over the shielding put a braided sleeve and that is all you have to do
@jude noble
Thanks for your response.
Speaker cables are not created equal :)
Materials used, construction method and the geometry of the conductors set inside the jacket, all have an effect on the electrical characteristics of a cable.
Some are intentionally built to present a capacitive link between the amp and the load ( Naim cables for example), while others avoid that by having a different geometrical construction, which makes the cable have also different electrical characteristics.
Then of course, it's the materials used for the conductors, with silver of high purity being the choice of many 'high end' manufacturers which, to a point, justify somewhat higher prices. Paul in his videos is showning a cable, specially made for him, that would be very time consuming to construct and therefore, could be priced accordingly.
Having said all this though, I do take your point about prices.
When I see cables costing $ xx,xxx I cannot help but think "snake oil" ; ) ...and there's plenty of that in this industry IMHO.
Yeah, I definitely get where you're coming from. I think in the audiophile community there should be more encouragement to DIY cables as you can make a high quality cable with not too much difficulty. Very high end cables can be complicated which DIY would not be appropriate for the average listener. But these high end cables really will only start to make a real difference when paired with high end amps and speakers. I guess when I get annoyed is where people are persuaded into spending $1000 on cables when their amp is worth maybe 3000 and speakers 3000 again. If you have a pair of wilson Alexx's and a suitable amp then yeah I can see that kind of money justified on cables, but in most cases, I think there are better things you can spend money on to improve your sound (room treatment, vinyl cleaners, better DAC, better amp, etc....)
Absolutely!
I often argue with some other members of the local Audio Club that, relocating your speakers has a much more dramatic effect in what we hear, than the addition of an exotic and grossly overpriced speaker cable.
Thanks for the chat!
why is the dog not moving? :
LOL keep the speaker cable off the ground, but all these guys put their amplifiers on the floor
Power line from the power station to your home are not shield so why by shield cable to go from you amp to the power socket????????????????????????????????? .
Wow. Where do we start..........
Route power cables away from signal cables, other than that insignificant diff. Like raising speaker cables off the floor, very stupid. Nothing but placebo. The more power that runs thru a wire the stronger the electromagnetic field. For a 120v power cord it dissipates within inches from the cord. 90%,ok benefit of doubt, 70% of hi end audio is placebo.
"You probably don't want to have the cables touching each other. You want to have a little bit of separation." NO, that's sheer SUPERSTITION. At audio frequencies it makes NO PERCEPTIBLE DIFFERENCE how close shielded, insulated audio signal cables are draped next to each other.
With power and speaker cables next to each other i've very rarely had interference, and if i did it was minor. Cleaning up the cable pile can help. But usually power and speaker cables are no problem at all.
However! If you use unshielded rca interconnects, especially thin cheap ones, you are bound to have a problem somewhere down the line if you have the rest of cabling all piled and bunched up behind your gear. Replacing those rca cables with fairly decent shielded ones fixed those problems.
Combined with just a little cable management and you get it to look a bit neater as well.
So it's not complete BS.
sheilding the power cables has a downside .it makes the sound "stresed" not engaging musically.its better to use stranded helix configuration cables as live or natural and keep the "grounding"wires seperated.and by the way paul foils like mg cables use are the best way to ground your system .i use 5 cm foil to each device with 40 cm foil all copper to the main grounding my power cables are duelund tinned copper strands with cotton sleeving .i have pitch black .no noises at all on my line.
paul showing that he can't remember field theory.....lol
Nah he's showing that he's a salesman and CEO of a company.
Not an engineer.
lol
Speaker cable: Unless you have speakers 40-50 feet from the amplifier, Ordinary "lamp cord" is fine. 16-18 gauge.
This guys seems so full of it. I use dollar store speaker wires sitting on the ground and it sounds great.
scalethemachine You sound like an expert.
LAZY DOG I am an expert in what feels good on my ear holes
scalethemachine good on you 👍🏼