Hi power hi Freq coax has been using pipes for years, a lot of years. Hi current and hi frequency likes to travel down the outside of a conductor. The tiddling amounts of voltage and current that audio uses, is not worth the bother.
Allan.
Hi power hi Freq coax has been using pipes for years, a lot of years. Hi current and hi frequency likes to travel down the outside of a conductor. The tiddling amounts of voltage and current that audio uses, is not worth the bother.
Allan.
Flexibility is a virtue, though. A few years ago I bought some 14AWG solid core "audiophile" speaker wire. (I paid basically the scrap value of the copper, though before the firm was bought out I think it went for $50 or so per foot.) It is unwieldy and annoying to use. Now I only use it inside cabinets.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ducatista47
Also, how thick does magnet wire come? For monoblocs behind speakers that might not matter, but for more typical installations (say, 10'-20' runs) with typical speakers (8Ω nominal, 3-4Ω minimum, impedance) one should really use 16AWG, or at the outside 18AWG.
For those who really care about superior connections, equipment can be modded. After all, audiophools do all kinds of pointless mods to their various parts. At least this one would provide some utility.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Mackenzie
Or one can use "professional" amplification.
Actually, that typically works just fine, so long as one is careful to ensure that stray strands don't end up shorting terminals together. (Yet another issue precluded by use of SpeakOns...) The oxidation just isn't an issue. The only difference between bare wire and a banana is that a banana is more convenient to take out/plug in. The only difference between bare wire and a spade is...with a spade you have to buy a bit of metal to put between the post and the wire.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Mackenzie
"Pro" audio versus "home" audio is more a marketing distinction than anything else. People on a JBL forum should really know that! The bottom line is, the SpeakOn is a better connector, for the above-ennumerated reasons. Now, is there a sonic difference between a SpeakOn-terminated speaker wire and spades/bananas/pins/tinned-wire/bare-wire? No. But the SpeakOn has practical advantages over the other ones. And they're cheap. So (especially on DIY projects) there's really no reason to futz with antiquated and comparatively fussy "hifi" connectors.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Mackenzie
I have a pair of B & W Silver signatures. They use silver throughout. speaker wires, voice coils, inductors, capacitors, biding posts, everything.
If I substitute a very high quality copper wire for the factory silver ones there is a dramatic and noticeable degradation of the sound.
I'm talking about copper wires that are about $60 per ft each side.
Be thankful you can't hear a difference or figure out why.
Thank god I'm deaf!Quote:
Originally Posted by tom1356
Or is it something else.:hmm:
Widget
I hope you are a better engineer then you are a banker!Quote:
Originally Posted by DS-21
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Widget
You seem to be happy with your system and I am happy with mine so it's all good.
Your B&Ws must be broken and you need the high resolution of copper to hear it :rotfl:Quote:
Originally Posted by tom1356
Whoa. Thankfully I am in the 99-something-percent that couldn't hear that difference! Seen the the price of silver lately? I don't sh*# dollars.Quote:
Originally Posted by tom1356
I guess the Silver verse copper debate will go on forever. Although silver is a better conductor than copper, it is only marginally so. !.59 x 10 -8 as opposed to 1.68 x 10 -8. Some people have referred to silver cables as an "emotional" upgrade.....
Jumping back to using pipes, it was discovered way back that HF likes to travel down the outside of a conductor. Quite simply, the metal in the middle of the conductor, is a waste of money so they started using pipes. It is not that it is better, it just makes good economic sense.
Allan.
It's important to note that the frequencies where this takes place is WAY above the audio frequency range.Quote:
Originally Posted by Allanvh5150
I'm happy to be one of those people who either are objective enough or deficient enough in hearing to tell the difference between cables given that they conduct well and don't introduce ill effects due to inductance or capacitance (or some as yet undiscovered "ance"). I stick to well designed basic solutions and prefer to spend my money in areas that get me more mileage for the buck (like more music).
I've heard it said, "You can't enjoy music, sex, or dope without a fat pipe."* Perhaps with all three, Nirvana can be reached.
*(I might have been the one who said that. It's hard to remember.) :hyp:
I take it that means you don't have anything relevant and on topic to write. (But for the record, I am neither banker nor engineer.)Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Mackenzie
No offense, but the only thing one can actually hear from a pair of B&W Silver Sigs is heaping excesses of midrange energy in the room, due to poor engineering. Here is a third-party measurement of their frequency response across the horizontal plane..Quote:
Originally Posted by tom1356
http://www.stereophile.com/images/ar...t/BSSFIG08.jpg
Too bad B&W couldn't see fit to engineer a silver waveguide for the tweeter, to properly match the woofer's directivity in the crossover region...
(And yes, I've heard them.)
No offense taken. I love heaps of midrange energy. That's where the music lives.Quote:
Originally Posted by DS-21
If one was to review this thread and count how many times that you've mentioned "MIT",Quote:
Originally Posted by herki the cat
well one conclusion comes to mind...
hope I'm wrong...and pls don't take this as some kind of attack.
maybe you are just a very very very happy customer ?
(I did read the now deleted comment abt how the MIT guy owned ALL cable and speaker wire
patents and thought it somewhat bogus tho)
A lot of people say the same thing everytime they read JBL and that is why they don't post here. I mean look what they did with the brand
Maybe Herki The Cat is right is right while the audio hoards look at him stupid and poke faces much the way the senate committee look at each other every time they meet to raise the ceiling of the national debt level. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_905841.html
I own an amplifier with hollow core cable in it and I have no reason to believe it sounds bad and no it does not have speakon terminals.
In this application the internal cables are so short as to not need termination networks that I wrote about in an earlier post.
This is perhaps the most useful post of the thread as its pretty well acknowledged that hollow core cables present an ideal audio conductor.
So among the war of words here is MIT again.
Unfortunately where there is money to be made a lot of wanna be's get in on the act and the substance of an original product becomes less obvious.
In the mean time the hoards will continue to drive Wal Mart sales
Quote:
The history of cables
According to MIT Inc., patents.... a thin copper pipe 3l8 inch dia works well only because there is no core in the pipe for the signal current to present the important parent audio- signal current magnetic field internally.
Both Mr.Polk and Mr. Brisson recognized this fact. Polk did produce a good speaker cable featuring a very flexible thin-wall 3/8 inch plastic pipe with a twin cross hatch woven +/- polarity jacket of insulated conductors for two channel stereo. The only problem was excessive shunt capacitor acting within the cable causing feedback amplifier instability; the solution was the Zo-Bel RC shunt on the amplifier output terminals, only if the amplifier was equiped with extended high frequency phase compensation.
Mr. Brisson's solution, while originally at Monster Cable, was to take a very small rope of nylon (?) and together with his son, wrap many side by side turns around this long rope, slowly stepping out of the door into the street. This became Monster cable.
Mr. Brisson walked across the street to HP Instruments & found a Spectrum Analyzer capable of measuring phase and amplitude from 10 Hz to 1000 mg Hz including the Audio Band. With this, Mr. Brissen could do every thing to fine tune any cable; we had these all over RCA Camden.
Mr. Brisson's next step was to wrap a spiral lay of many strands of #30 wire over the nylon rope to inductively slow down the upper frequency spectrum to at least 500 Hz. A second spiral overlay of 15 strands of #21 wire completed the cable from 500 Hz to maybe 50 Hz, and it did sound great..This was one of the first MIT patents.
I recommend studying Bruce Brisson's patents to see how MIT Inc., And Transparent Audio Inc, a fierce competitor of MIT Inc., became extremely successful essentially with similar cable technology.
How can a very expensive product that has grown since 1970 be considered a sham by so many intelligent brilliant audio engineers & the (unwashed)... just kiding... enjoy a good laugh.
Avatar sound was recorded with unobtanium speaker cables from "MIT Interface Technologies Inc."
The SkyWalker Lucas post production sound venue is 100% equipped with MIT cables which cost $20,000 each. The SkyWalker Lucas theater at SkyWalker Ranch in Calafornia is also equipped with aQty' of (40) power amplifiers back stage feeding a Qty' of (40) JBL Speaker Drivers via 40 foot long MIT cables of the same unobtanium type.
Not to worry__ the Skywalker Lucas instalation is a "cost no object,"professional business venture. In the following "MIT at the Movies" presentation : "Link," you can view the awsome engineering history of Avatar's making.....Highly recommended.
Sky Walker has more than 10 Acadamy Award Winning Films with "MIT-Interface" If you enjoyed the Magnificient Skywalker Sound, you must see how they did it in