tweeter speaker wire - Page 5

You seem to be an expert on electrical properties and physics. I posed a simple question. Assuming a solid copper core, is there physical and/or electrical considerations using RG6 with a steel braid as opposed to a copper braid? Answer the question.

I never mentioned copper clad steel core vs. solid copper core.

In your opinion.... if you don't have FM or AC interference, does using RG6 have any benefit as opposed to "normal" speaker wire?

OTOH, I totally agree. The OP should just experiment and use what works best to his perception.

Hey, any 12 year old with google can look like an expert..Perhaps that's me??

Already did.

Here it is again.. A copper braid with the same aspect ratio, will also contribute no added inductance to the cable. Seemed clear to me...(yah, it's not a simple subject, I try..) I know. I was pointing out how RG-6 is a generic term for a whole lotta different wire construction. I've tried to solder aluminum braid (not easy), but I've not actually seen nor used steel braid rg-6. I do not expect the OP to hear any difference. But if he does (either real or imagined), that's just fine with me. It will have different distributed parameters, but a discussion of t-line distributed parameters and midband delay based on reflection coefficients at 1 to 5Khz is just a tad beyond the OP's question, no? Agreed. As you can see, he's just asking questions. Laymen without an EE to their name can only search the web for this stuff, when they come in with questions couched in stuff they read on the web, sometimes it's important to be very tolerant of the level of the questions. Like the cross-connected coax via AA.

jn

Cables really don't get better. The only difference you can make is to make them worse. You can be lucky (or planning) in a way that the worse part of it suits the application, but if we're talking hinder free transmission - the only thing that would win over a regular copper wire would be a superconductor and I'd still want to blindtest it for audibility.

Oh, trust me...superconductors would not be better.

First, you cannot get away from LC = 1034 (epsilon)

Then, the warm to cold transitions are not nice at all.

Then there's the issue of frostbite and oxygen deficiency.

jn

Oh, I was referring to the future point where we have superconduction at room temperature ( the Nobel prize for it is a given ).

We already have room temperature superconductors.

Problem is, the room is very, very cold..

jn

I've tried -42C, if it's colder than that - count me out!

According to the always-correct Wikipedia, the warmest critical temp they list for a superconductor is 134 Kelvin, or -218 Fahernheit (-139 Celcius)

Pretty chilly.

You have asked an ambigiuous question. I assume you meant the space around the wire which connects the voice coil to the amplifier, and not the space around the voice coil.

To get the voice coil to move requires current flow through it. That current is delivered by the two conductors which connect the coil leads to the amp terminals. That hard conductive path is needed in order to allow the current to flow. They do not rely on insulation to do this. To prevent the wires from connecting to one another (shorting), insulation is used. They could simply be spaced apart and bare, but that is not practical.
The voice coil needs nothing else in order to function.

The type of wire, single conductor, coax, zip, twisted pair, will all function in essentially the same fashion, that of allowing the current to flow. Many people claim that some special "thing" related to the type of wire will make an audible difference. Many claim it doesn't or cannot.

For somebody just starting in this hobby, it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of content available on the internet. You are in that boat.

As long as you do nothing dangerous, play to your hearts content, swapping wires, moving speakers, adjusting room acoustics..and listen. Your preferences are your own.

But I recommend you ask on forums such as this one before you part with large quantities of cash for silly things which do nothing, PT Barnum stated it best.

Cables will make a difference at some level, but the question remains how much, and is it significant to you.

If you are welcomed with hostility in response to your questions, just go elsewhere. Life is too short.

jn

always-correct Wikipedia..now, that's funny.

I've tossed around for years the notion of fixing the entries in wiki on E/M t-lines and non inductive resistors..but haven't considered the effort worthwhile.

No matter what material we use, we always seem to go to 4.5 Kelvin, or 1.8K. You can't get serious** current capability at critical temp.

jn

** serious being 2 kiloamps in a 20 guage wire.

+1

In general, during your experimental stage, try not to spend more than you can be fully comfortable with on accessories like wire.

Be aware that "i heard a difference" is not equal to "the new wire made it sound different." Just like 'my pain ended" does not mean "the placebo is an effective pain reliever.

IMO (or at least for me IME) it's a p!ss poor listener who doesn't hear things differently when playing the same thing over with zero changes. Maybe it's in part being a musician, but I promise you I got quite a few listens into Dark Side of the Moon, WIsh You Were Here (more my fave Floyd although who can pass up "several Species, etc. from Ummagumma, but I digress) or even Sgt Pepper's before I stopped hearing new nuances. I'll occasionally identify some little thing in an album I've heard for years, even now. IMO because hearing involves brain and auditory system, some of what and how we hear depends on our attitude when we listen, and some depends on how we foucs our attention. Without a doubt all the layers of Money (at least all that my then-system could reporduce) hit my ears every time I listened. But I didn't notice everything all at once . . . and IME, once I "hear" a new detail, it's always there (unless it's revealed or masked by a significant frequency response difference between two systems.

Moreover, for those who are highly attentive (and AFAIK, that means not me) you'll get a slightly different frequency balance through the crossover region between tweeter and mid/bass if you move a few inches because the wavelengths are short and small changes make a difference in how things add or subtract in the region where both have significant output.

You are missing out on something. It's the triple coax where the magic starts to happen.

IMO, absent trable rolloff caused by high capacitance, the only time a cable should have an audible effect is if it is undersized, adding significantly to the effective output impedance of the amplifier. And that's only going to make a difference if the amp had a highish output impedance already and the speakers happen to have a difficult to drive (ie drops low) impedance. Then you can get audible frequency response anomalies. You can see this kind of thing in Stereophile's tests of power amps, where they use a "simulated speaker load" and often show som quarter to half decibel departures from flat. Adding significant resistance via the cable makes that worse.

On the other hand, if you have, say, a passive electromagnetic guitar pickup, which has inductance and capacitance of its own (ie will have a resonant frequency tuned by the combination of those factors) a guitar cable's capacitance can change the tuning of the resonant peak (generally lowering it, removing "sparkle" or "icepick" depending on the listener or player. We're talking about a frequency hump of at last a couple of dB, so it's clearly audible when you move it around (which is probably why Hendrix liked curly cables with his early CBS era ("let's save a buck by reducing the number of turns on the pickup coils") hyperbright Strats. But in the HT realm, at least if you don't have a turntable, you don't have a source that's subject to all that much variation via cables.

FWIW, AFAIK, the current (no pun intended) thought is that in any electricical system (including distrubution from the power station to your home) while "current" is said to "flow" electrons don't actually move much. They just excite each other down the line . . . which makes, to me, some of the justifications produced by esoteric cable folks untenable. But that's just me.

Just to clarify you mean moving yourself physically and not moving the wiring. I know it sounds like a silly observation to technical folks but note that there are many people fooled into thinking the physical length of the wire can cause delays at audio frequencies. I have seen many confuse acoustical delays with electrical delays. Huge difference. One is at the speed of sound and the other 60% the speed of light or faster.

The truth of course is that any wire has an electrical delay. Gets really important at hundreds of mhz, there are even timed traces on your PC motherboard. But in audio systems it's so minuscule it's a joke.

Like all these audiophile beliefs that are founded on factual electronics theories you have to keep it in context to the band of frequencies of interest. What is important in a cell phone tower equipment shack may not be in even the most expensive HiFi system.

This is probably one of the most "entertaining" threads of 2012.

I hope it doesn't drag on to win 2013 as well...

Huh?

...like an acid flashback?

Actually, the analysis is what will not be understood, the delay probably would.
I believe sol means speed of light.


Humans are incapable of sensing timing errors below a millionth of a second, 1 uSec.

The jitter issue (I will try to keep it simple) is a result of how the receiver electronics defines the clock signal for recovering the analog stream. I recall a paper by Hawksford where he showed how the jitter "spectra" would show up in the analog output as a result of the receiver electronics attempting to reconstruct the clock signal. We assume that the digital to analog converter at the end of the digital path makes it's output at exact intervals, but if it's clock is trying to figure out when that time is by guessing at the digital stream, stream noise will affect the output.

jn

Yeah I got that hence my "huh".

Human ears can detect the the difference between 30% and 60% of light speed?

Yup. If the source is 10 light seconds away, that's a 3 second difference.

Course, it it's 2 meters, um, that's a tad small.

jn

If they make blinded comparison not work, don't they have to equally make sighted comaprisons not work? Or do those realities only apply sometimes?