Talk:Speaker wire

Original discussion

weasel words.

The fourth paragraph contains the sentences, "Many manufacturers catering to audiophiles as well as those available in department stores make unmeasurable claims about wire being open, dynamic, or smooth," and, "To justify the claims, many rely on less understood electrical properties such as skin effect or resonance." These sentences beg the question, "How many?" This set of Weasel Words could be improved with references to manufacturers that make such claims, department stores that carry the products under question, as well as articles that call into question the claims that the manufacturers make.

The second paragraph describes a predecessor of modern speakers, one in which two electromagnets are used to induce movement as opposed to the more common permanent magnet and electromagnet arrangement. It mentions that a company in France still makes them but provides no references. Fetmar (talk) 18:09, 25 September 2009 (UTC) 18:09, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

original research

The only references made in this article are to Speaker Wire Manufacturers. The following describes areas which need references in order to reduce original research.

1. The first sentence indicates an existing debate in the audiophile and high fidelity communities but does not provide any primary or secondary references to this debate. It also shows bias by questioning the honesty of marketing practices without making any references.

2. The second sentence implies that there is a written history of Speaker Wire, but does not provide a reference.

3. While electric principals are discussed in physics and engineering classes and an understanding of the knowledge is widespread among persons with scientific backgrounds, I do not believe that such knowledge is so commonplace to warrant no reference. In addition, there are possible references for the science discussed ad infinitum. Therefore a reference should be provided not only to resolve original content disputes but also to enlighten the reader. by CEMiii: just read almost any elec engr textbook.

4. References should be added to the NFPA National Electric Code, any applicable TIA standards as well as any other standards that may apply. by CEMiii: no NEC applies.

5. The sentences, "The quality of construction is often just for aesthetic purposes and convenience," and, "Highly stranded wires tend to be more flexible and hence easier to work with," may be invalid as a pair. I may be able to provide a reference that shows the affects of Coulomb's Lawon stranded wires as opposed to a thicker single wire. The sentence, "To achieve a low resistance in the wire, use shorter lengths, a larger gauge of wire, and better conducting materials," is also disputed using Coulomb's Law.

by CEMiii: it is well known by any application engineer that more strands equals more flexibility! That is why all appliance cords, especially sweeper and powered hand sanders have small, highly stranded cords. This is why the trailing cables for mine face-cutting machines [which usually have four 600 volt insulated conductors inside of an overall jacket], welding electrode, and locomotive cables are quite flexible. In the 10y I worked at Anaconda Wire & Cable R&D, I believe the flex testing machine ran 80+ percent of each work day in the Portable Cable Lab!

Coulomb's law will only be an influence for higher currents at high frequencies.

6. The linked Wikipedia article about Gold states that Gold does, in fact, oxidize, proving the following sentence wrong, "However, gold does not oxidize." by CEMiii: the 62nd edition of Handbook of Physics & Chemistry states that gold is unaffected by air.

Oobyduby 21:47, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually, most manufacturers sex up their wires with all sorts of odd stuff. The problem is that nobody seems to be doing ABX testing on them to hear a difference. There are also machines that can measure many properties of the wire to test the claims. Any claim that a wire is 'smoother' or otherwise less than clear deserves special attention, since the wires are not supposed to affect the fidelity of the connection. They shouldn't be 'colouring' the sound.

All of this IS testable, I just haven't a clue why a group doesn't. Perhaps someone can find an independent source of wire tests?

Also, I sent a request to the people maintaining the Coulomb's Law page to see if it's applicable in this situation. If it is, it probably should be added to the article.

Lowmagnet 22:00, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Cable testing...

Since I haven't included any references, please feel free to disregard or view my comment as a simple statistic. I'm basically taking the sledgehammer to a frog approach on this (test & observe)

According to my testing with frequency generators and oscilloscope/spectrum analysers, I _believe_ that wire can slightly affect the signal or even colour sound, especially when driven very hard. But, I have found no correlation between the price and amount of signal loss no matter which brand, instead the colouring seems to be caused by small errors in production, where bits of wire from the same roll, will have similar defects.

Single core (non-flexible) cables seem to have much smaller signal loss than the equivalent diameter/isolation, twinned (flexible) cables.

The easiest way I have found to measure defects is to look around 5-20GHz waveforms and their shape, by simply storing an "image" of samples on the oscilloscope and overlaying it with a second waveform from the other end of about 20m cable. Now, I agree that this procedure is explained in a very un-scientific and probably downright stupid manner, but anyone who can borrow (or god forbid, buy) 20GHz test equipment can easily "see" results in this way, and hopefully have the time and patience to publish a free scientific report on it. (I can't do this anymore since I've switched to active speaker systems entirely)

Yes, "audio isn't 20GHz", but the test still seems to be useful since according to all my test results, the errors on high frequencies using short lengths of cable seem to have a direct relation to more subtle errors seen at lower frequencies when extending the cable length 100-200m. 213.114.213.203 07:07, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Picture

Does anyone have a better close up picture of the stripped wire?--Light current 15:45, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Capacitance Causes High-Frequency Loss?

Someone just added several paragraphs on this topic. Let's stop and think this through:

• For the purposes of argument, let's assume 100 pF per foot. This strikes me as outrageously high; I just measured some 14 gauge zip-cord-like cable on my precision LCR bridge and got 16 pF/foot, but wot the 'ell, ehh? 'Factor of >6 safety margin.

• Let's assume 20 KHz, the worst-case frequency.

• That means the capacitive reactance is about 80Kohms per foot at 20 KHz. So let's take a 20 foot (rather long) speaker cable. That means that the total capacitive reactance of the cable is about 4 KOhms.

• The output impedance of a transistorized amplifier is something less than an ohm, but let's take a hypothetical 16 Ohm tube amp instead. 'Nuther safety margin.

• Connected to this amp, our incredibly capacitive speaker cable will cause, at 20 KHz, the loss of about 16/4000 = 0.4% of the signal.

Based on all this, does anyone see a reason why we shouldn't revert out (or substantially attenuate) the new section on cable capacitance?

Atlant 17:37, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

The editor went on adding material, eventually creating an example based on speaker wire with a capacitance of 1000 pF/ft. At this point, my threshold had been reached and I reverted out the entire section.

I have no objection to a mention of capacitance, but its effect in speaker wires is negligible for essentially all practical cases.

Atlant 12:18, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Eh? You say 80k per foot and a 20 foot wire, and get 4k? Unless my calculator needs batteries or I need sleep, that should be about 1.6 megohms. Which gives us a signal loss of about 0.001%, further showing it is almost completely negligible.

208.114.180.220 07:42, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

The anonymous author above is wrong, 20 "resistors" (model of capacitance) in parallel result in 20 times less resistance. So indeed 80k / 20 = 4k. I also agree that the above measured 16 pF/foot (in my case a calculated 42 pF/m for cheap 2.5mm^2 cables) is much more realistic.

Woutput (talk) 20:45, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Hi guys! Old conversation, but here is a followup anyway. :)

I calculated fresh tables of capacitive and resistive losses based on the original equations. To put the data into perspective, I looked some sample values of capacitance per foot and inductance per foot, and calculated maximum cable lengths for <= 1% loss. Hopefully it is adequately neutral in the face of the great speaker-wire debates. Txinviolet (talk) 23:49, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Gold plating explained

Sufficient thickness of gold plate is useful to prevent troublesome increase of contact resistance due to corrosion in some conditions, such as damp locations, or where extremely low noise and maximum reliability are important, such as recording studio microphone leads.

However gold flashing on consumer grade connectors is normally a marketing exercise, with no significant real world benefit for 3 reasons. On such equipment the plating is too thin to be effective. And even the effects of thicker gold plate would be insignificant compared to the noise and reliabilty issues of more or less all indoor domestic equipment. Tabby (talk) 21:05, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Banana plug safety

"in many European Countries the banana plug is coincidentally the same plug used for live electrical outlets (with 230 volts)."

no! But banana plugs do fit mains sockets in some euro countries. Tabby (talk) 21:06, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Perennial audiophile controversy

Given the standing arguments about audio equipment, it would help the quality of the article to refer to multiple sources on effects of electrical characteristics on audio performance. I'm tagging to request more references; if you disagree, please explain before untagging. chrylis (talk) 20:48, 13 October 2008 (UTC)