Speaker wire - does it matter?

Very cool! So, sozocaps, when it asks for power consumption, is that for the amp or the speaker?

Sorry if that was an extremely dumbass question...I'm not very technical

I'd say 10-12AWG is good for most things. Most of those calculators are designed around frequency sweeps, impedance, parasitic losses and such. They rarely take into account instantaneous current demands, transient currents and other things like that. Remember, testing a wire is not the same as testing the system with the wire in it.

Also, solder the connectors to the cable with a decent silver solder. Don't use compression connectors.

Everything matters. Efficiency in speaker wire is important to delivering to your monitors that what you are actually listening to reflects how it will sound elsewhere.

I've always struggled with this. As in, how can the last 3 feet make such a difference when the quality of power to your wall receptacle is subject to the variables of the condition of your building's electrical wiring, power panel, municipal power company, etc. Of course, this assumes that you are not using a dedicated power filtering box.

I do not doubt that there is a difference, perhaps up until the upgraded cord exceeds the quality of the building's electrical wiring and panel. Beyond this, I would need to hear for myself. Or maybe it's that power filtering systems clean up/stabilize the incoming electricity to the point where exotic "endpoint" A/C cables have a real effect, preserving the "purity" of the power until it hits the final destination. I guess both should be used together to get the true benefit.

Interesting stuff, thanks mjb.

Hey Matt, I totally understand, it's just better to hear for yourself. Before you even think of a power cord, make sure the place your getting your power from has something like this: www.psaudio.com/shop/dectet-power-center/


If you'd like to try a few things, this is a good place to start, no need to spend crazy money: www.musicdirect.com/p-3064-shunyata-diamondback-platinum-power-cable.aspx


Even better than that, look around here: app.audiogon.com ,it takes a while to realize the link to the classifieds are on the bottom, or you have to search, what comes up first are dealer's links.

a used cable will be fine, lots of audiophiles have upgraditis.

There's a company called Harmonic Technology, they make what I consider the best bargain in a power cord, this is all the cord you'll ever need , unless you have a Porsche of a stereo system.

My top recommendation is the Harmonic Technology pro 11ACm used. Keep looking for it n Audiogon, It costs a lot more, but can usually be had for $125 if you're patient.

Then get ready.., I once felt the same way. Someone was trying to sell me a $99 interconnect, and I couldn't fathom why it could be worth that much more than a standard interconnect, until I heard it..

I wasn't kidding about the change of an outlet occasionally being a jaw dropping experience. Sometimes, it's not as drastic, it depends somewhat on the quality of AC you're getting, but for $50, you get peace of mind too. Imagine, you spent hours and days and years developing and tweaking an audio recording system, and out of stubbornness, refuse to spend $50 on a product that every single thing you have uses, it doesn't make sense.

I can only strongly suggest you try some of these things. I'd prefer not to get caught in a "cables make no difference" debate, as it's a can of worms I'd rather not open yet again.

Sometimes the difference is as subtle as comparing a Waves plug and a UAD plug of the same piece, you gotta have ears to hear it, but it's there. Sometimes, it's night and day. Like I said before, if my wife took notice, that's really saying something!

On my stereo system, I'm only using a step up version of plain wire. It's from a company called Tributaries. I'd sold my expensive rig, and that was left in the closet, meant for different things. The difference I heard when compared to the big fat Monster Cable I tried was clear. There was a Tom Waits song I liked, but could never understand what he was saying, when I changed to the Tributraies wire, I could now understand the words. There was a bass line in a song that only after switching to the better speaker wire, could I tell the bass was a synth, so it made a pretty big difference, using better wire. I use Mogami on my tracking system speakers. 

I'm brewing up a brownout as we speak.

Since I used to design power supplies and such, I can add a few things about power cables too. Again, thickness is your friend (that's what she said..)..

What you are really concerned about with is moving charge. As with speaker cables, the cable needs to move charge very quickly and efficiently. Since there are always losses involved with moving charge from one end to the other, you have impedance in the cable. You can get around this in multiple ways depending on what types of parasitic losses and impedances you have in the system. This can be altered by the size of the cable, the material and/or the jacketing/shielding of the cables.

For AC cables, you have resistive losses of the copper itself as the main problem. Since amps work by quickly moving currents around, it stands to reason that they *demand* currents very quickly too. Even though most amps have large amounts of capacitors in their power supply sections for nothing more than supplementing fast transient current demands, there never seems to be *enough* bulk cap in most situations. I suppose it's partly cost savings and partly the designer saying it's "good enough". Since you still need fast currents, the next source is from the wall outlet, but that is bridged by a cable. In this case, a larger cable gauge *can* move charge faster and more efficiently than a smaller cable. You could also change an identical sized cable to something like silver and gain the same or better charge transfer for the same gauge.

HOWEVER.. While I'm on board with AC cables having an effect on the sound, I DO NOT buy that some cables have mysteriously better sound than others beyond the simple thickness difference. I'll explain.

Connectors. I do not buy that a connector can make a huge difference, unless it's a poor quality connector. I do not like the "screw-on" connectors of any type. Simply touching two conductors together with a pressure fit is not the same as bonding them with solder. Even if it's made of gold, kissed by angels and delivered by Perseus atop winged Pegasus, if that thing has screw bindings, it sucks. Solder those connections and solder them well.

Connection. Someone smart once said that the worst link in the chain will determine the performance of the whole system. That's absolutely true. You cable could be worth more than someone's car but will still probably be plugged into the 0.99$ socket that the homebuilder put in there. That socket will still have a mechanical connection to the copper house wiring(probably only 14-16ga), which is run 50ft+ to the breaker/fuse box. Do you still think your magic cable is the weakest link? Guess again. It's probably the tarnished brass/nickel fingers in the socket you plugged your magic cable into. Remember how I said that mechanical compression connections suck? Well, this one is the most suck of them all. Chances are, unless yours is brand new, that it's a loose connection with tarnish and perhaps pockmarks from hot-plugging stuff in.

Noise. Is your amp the ONLY thing on the circuit? Is it the only thing on in the whole house? I bet you have your computer(NOISE!) and other things on the same circuit. I bet your A/C unit (NOISE!) is running at the same time too.. Fluorescent lights? Forget about them (NOISE!).. Or your refrigerator(noise!).. This is the drawback to having a better cable to the amp. Remember that whole "less impedance = good" thing I mentioned above? Well it also lets in more noise. Now you'll need a noise filter as well. Don't buy that overpriced crap everybody hawks. Go get something like this:

www.mouser.com/catalog/catalogusd/646/2839.pdf

or this:

www.mouser.com/catalog/catalogusd/646/2840.pdf

Depending on what your amp tech says you need, and have him install it. These are what professional designers use. They work well and are probably what are in those insanely expensive "power conditioners" use anyway. Forget UN-Interruptable Power Supplies (UPS) for amps. They are made for computers and such and rarely have quality signal output.

Ground. This is probably the most ignored and least understood part of the whole thing. When is ground not actually ground? In your house, that's when. In the USA, neutral and ground are tied together in the breaker/fuse box and then grounded to either a ground rod or to water pipes or something in an attempt to keep them at "ground" or in other terms, reduce the impedance on the ground side so that currents flow away from the load. Chances are, you have significant currents running on "ground" wires, especially if you have a lot of devices hooked to each other that use grounded signal cables. We call these "ground loops". They allow noise and currents to enter your devices right through ground bypassing all the filtering and decoupling you choose to add. This doesn't even take into account systems that don't have safety ground. Some older houses in the USA and around the world only have two lines (hot and neutral) to each socket. Not only is that dangerous, but now you have nothing but currents flowing through both lines. Oh and "balanced AC power" is a complete lie. Don't trust anyone who uses that sales pitch. There is no such thing in the real world.

The amps themselves.. Amps have a sound. the designers designed that sound. Either they decided that sound was "good enough" and stopped, price/performance compromises were made, or they actually set out to design that exact sound. Chances are, they used regular old wall outlet power during design and testing. Hell, some amps, like Mesa Rectifiers, NEED that laggy "current starved" sound. That's what made them special back in the day and that's why you can still set them to use the tube diodes for tone. Those diodes were slow and made charge transfer difficult for the amp, which gave it the grunt it was known for.

Now that the truth is out there, make your own choice.

My choice is that I installed new 12ga AC wiring from the breaker to all the outlets in the studio. Each junction is SOLDERED and only wirenutted to keep shorts from happening. The main outlets for the studio are high quality and high insertion-force to attempt a better connection. Everything else, like the effects racks, is HARD WIRED to the system. I took two weeks to sort out all of the ground loops even resorting to disassembling the studio computer and rack gear to sand down any places on the chassis that weren't making good ground connections. All of this lowered my noise floor 20db.

I also use 10ga IEC cables for my amps and use 10ga cable from the amp to the speaker. 

For my un-powered monitors, I use 10ga pure copper wire, soldered to banana jacks with high insertion force jacks and plugs.  Now, that made a difference going from 16ga and spring finger connections.

Tony, unfortunately that's not correct. USA 120VAC (single phase) line power is not balanced and is not split across the hot and neutral. The "hot" is 120VAC(RMS so peaks are actually higher than that), the "neutral" is considered 0VAC (although it's fairly common to see some voltage on it as there will be a lot of return currents from devices) and "ground" is tied to "neutral" in the breaker box and then they are both tied to earth ground. USA 220VAC is actually 2x 120VAC lines out of phase but then are split to two separate 120VAC legs in the breaker box.

Balanced power is where you send "hot" and "neutral" through a 1:1 power transformer (called a matching transformer) to decouple the neutral from ground (as it's tied in the breaker box) and create a true balanced(60V/60V) input into your device's AC input. Ground is still attached to chassis for safety reasons though. People claim all kinds of things about balanced power but you have to look at it from the application standpoint. Matching transformers are commonly used to go from "single-ended" to "balanced" and back all the time in audio signal usage. The power transformer does essentially the same thing, just with a 50/60hz sine wave. So your power transformer, in the case of a tube amp, is probably configured to output a "single ended" HV output for plate biasing and a "balanced" 6-12V for heaters in the case of AC heaters. It can also be configured to output a "single ended" output in the case of DC heaters.

So why would you go from a "single-ended" AC source, to a "balanced" AC output just to go back to "single-ended" outputs again? We're not talking about sending AC over long distances here, like you would with audio signals. At most, you'll be going a couple feet. All you've done is spend money and waste more heat with your balanced power..

But wait.. There is a single reason that these balanced systems seem to help.. It's the inductive nature of the matching transformers being used. They add another layer of LPF filtering to the AC input. Since they are designed to resonate and couple the sine signal at 50-60hz, they are very lossy in the higher frequencies which helps them create a LPF. You could do the same thing with one of those inlet filters I linked to above with a lot less cost.

There is no magic in audio. It's all physics. If someone claims to have created magic that nobody else can make work, it's snake oil, pure and simple.