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Post by donr on Jun 2, 2014 20:40:01 GMT -6
Getting into the weeds here, but I was astonished 13 years ago to plainly hear a difference between 16 gauge wire and modest audioquest bi-wire on B+W 700 series speakers. Bi-wire, when the speaker still used the crossover? wtf?
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Post by jimwilliams on Jun 3, 2014 9:57:44 GMT -6
Either you hear the differences or you don't. If you don't, use zip cable and save the $. The AES also had a detailed speaker cable review/test about 20 years ago in the Journal. They used everything from zip cord to 10 awg auto battery cable. Yes, the battery cable tested and sounded poorly.
The winner? It was a 32 section data wire, not too different than Ray Kimber's multi-strand 8TC. It's interesting reading if you want to look it up.
My "ears" were opened when I visited Ray's facility in Ogden, Utah. He has a rather large industrial building, full of winding gear, the lab and other areas. I brought my favorite mic cable, the Belden 9182 LAN network cable along with a pair of modifed AKG 414 mics and a High Speed mic preamp. The belden 9182 is a low noise, 150 ohm impedance, teflon wrapped 22 awg shielded cable with a 70% propagation delay and a gigahertz bandwidth. Stray capacitance is a very low 8 pf/foot. It was designed to carry heavy, fast data loads across from building to building, they also make a plenum version. Paramount Pictures also wired their entire foley building with it after I brought down a couple 100' runs to try out. You can hear that from 1996 on in all of their releases.
The Belden sounded very good and then Ray had an employee quickly make up a 20' run of AGSS 19 awg pure stranded silver 3 brand into a mic cable. We plugged than in after listening to the Belden. Ray looks at me and asks, "pretty quiet wire, ehh?".
Yes it is. There is all that noise we are always used to hearing drop off. It was weird. A 3 braid, UN-shielded cable that is dead quiet? We wrapped it around large power transformers in the Krell power amps and still no hum pickup. Every other cable still has that background noise but this stuff is so quiet you think there's a noise gate someplace, but you still hear every detail, in fact, you hear details other cables absorb. At about $100 per foot, it ought to be great and it is. With silver at $19 per ounce, it's also a good investment.
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Post by jeromemason on Jun 3, 2014 15:20:12 GMT -6
I remember back when I first wired up my hybrid rig. I had a bunch of old hosa snakes from when I did live sound back in the day, and I was waiting on some Mogami snakes and cables to be made for me (back before I learned the craft of wiring a DB25). I did a few mixes for some clients off the Hosa's and then got my Mogami's in and ran the same exact mixes and I was floored. I ran off the mixes for the clients free of charge because I literally couldn't have those mixes out there knowing how much better they sounded with all the new cabling.
I made a thread back on GS about it and it was a pretty large thread, I posted both files for people to hear and everyone heard the difference, but there were some unbelievable ball breaking techies that wouldn't let up, so instead of arguing I just said the test was flawed because there may had been something wrong with the Hosa's to shut them up, but there wasn't anything wrong with those Hosa's besides the fact they were cheap. The test was 100% real, and for the ones that don't believe in the cable theory it's impossible to reason.
The same goes for speaker wire.... inductance capacitance and rf interference are real, yes even in short runs if your cables are like anyone else's whose are next to power and other types of cabling in your rig. If you want to tell me that none of that matters in short distances then we'll have to disagree because I trust my ears, and I know when I can hear things more clearly and defined. But this is such a damn touchy subject, I wrestled to even post this as I'm sure some will roll their eyes or light me up, but I don't care, I've ran the race and got the T-shirt in this controversy and I know what was at the finish line for me. For those that think there is no difference that's fine.
Two of my most favorite mixing engineers disagreed publicly on this, and I think both are the best in the business, although one is no longer with us. But Mike Shipley swore that the Mic cable produced for the Alison Krauss record caused them to disengage the eq and that the difference blew him and everyone else away. Then my other favorite, Justin Niebank, says in an video interview "it makes no difference, just grab a cable and let's hit record". So in that respect I can't argue with those that believe it's hogwash, but I'm comfortable with the fact I don't believe it is, and believe it's very very real. No wrong answer in this debate.
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Post by svart on Jun 3, 2014 20:29:23 GMT -6
I remember back when I first wired up my hybrid rig. I had a bunch of old hosa snakes from when I did live sound back in the day, and I was waiting on some Mogami snakes and cables to be made for me (back before I learned the craft of wiring a DB25). I did a few mixes for some clients off the Hosa's and then got my Mogami's in and ran the same exact mixes and I was floored. I ran off the mixes for the clients free of charge because I literally couldn't have those mixes out there knowing how much better they sounded with all the new cabling. I made a thread back on GS about it and it was a pretty large thread, I posted both files for people to hear and everyone heard the difference, but there were some unbelievable ball breaking techies that wouldn't let up, so instead of arguing I just said the test was flawed because there may had been something wrong with the Hosa's to shut them up, but there wasn't anything wrong with those Hosa's besides the fact they were cheap. The test was 100% real, and for the ones that don't believe in the cable theory it's impossible to reason. The same goes for speaker wire.... inductance capacitance and rf interference are real, yes even in short runs if your cables are like anyone else's whose are next to power and other types of cabling in your rig. If you want to tell me that none of that matters in short distances then we'll have to disagree because I trust my ears, and I know when I can hear things more clearly and defined. But this is such a damn touchy subject, I wrestled to even post this as I'm sure some will roll their eyes or light me up, but I don't care, I've ran the race and got the T-shirt in this controversy and I know what was at the finish line for me. For those that think there is no difference that's fine. Two of my most favorite mixing engineers disagreed publicly on this, and I think both are the best in the business, although one is no longer with us. But Mike Shipley swore that the Mic cable produced for the Alison Krauss record caused them to disengage the eq and that the difference blew him and everyone else away. Then my other favorite, Justin Niebank, says in an video interview "it makes no difference, just grab a cable and let's hit record". So in that respect I can't argue with those that believe it's hogwash, but I'm comfortable with the fact I don't believe it is, and believe it's very very real. No wrong answer in this debate. Actually, no they aren't the same in the slightest. Read my posts above. Speaker wire is nothing like cables used for line level audio. Firstly, your shielded line level audio cable is a conductor surrounded by a capacitive dielectric material which in turn is surrounded by a "shield" and/or a stranded ground wire. The dielectric type, material and thickness have huge effects on signals. The thickness of the conductor vs. the dielectric and the cross section of the shield/ground matter too. It all matters. Speaker cables have none of these and while they have an outer sheath, the impedance is so low, any parasitic capacitance is negligible compared to the dielectric of a shielded cable. If you want to play with impedances and LPF rolloff frequencies of various cable capacitances, the equation is F=1/2piRC where F is the LPF frequency, R is the impedance of the line level system (usually the load resistor in your devices) and C is the total capacitance of the length of cable, which is measured per foot in the cable's datasheet. You also have to keep in mind in these situations is that once you plug a cable into these devices, it becomes part of a system, and the system will work differently with different parts that might otherwise not adversely affect a different system.. It's perfectly possible that those Hosa cables would sound just fine in another system with different impedances, etc, and your mogami cable wouldn't make any difference in that same system. Mogami cares about the way it's cables are made and make them to the best of their ability for the price people will pay. Hosa cares enough to make cables that are useable for much cheaper for those not willing to pay Mogami prices. So, yes, I can buy that there is a difference and I personally think that Mogami sounds the slightest bit better than cheap cable, but broad comments like equating speaker cable and line level audio cable is not correct and will only serve to confuse those who don't know better. Another thing you didn't mention is that the connectors used on Hosa cables are generally poor, tarnish easily, have high electrical resistance and poor insertion force(pressure to make the connection). Connectors used in making higher end cables are much better and will suffer these issues less, and will suffer less parasitic issues within the connector too. |
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Post by keymod on Jun 4, 2014 4:18:45 GMT -6
I have always used 12/2 SJO cable with excellent results. I don't doubt that the more expensive cables made from silver conductors will perform and sound better but I'm not sure the difference would be worth the extra cost to me, at least not at this time. If I ever get everything else in the chain as good as it can be, within my own affordability constraints, then a move to much more expensive and higher-end cabling would be something to consider.
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