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Some impressions on speaker wire
I recently made a nice looking set of speaker wires, only to find myself disappointed. I figured I would share my impressions in the event anyone has ever experienced the same, or has a reason for my experience.
Full disclosure, this is fully sighted, completely subjective. I however will argue against confirmation bias, as the cables I wanted to replace sounded the best, and the ones I wanted to use sounded the worst, and not by a little.
I’ll preface my “review” with my general views on the topic. I 100% stand firm that I can hear differences in things such as caps, cables, amps and components, etc. I however do not subscribe to the ridiculously priced luxury parts, just that different things sound different, more expensive not necessarily being better. So I’ll try to write this in a manner to not make me sound like a lunatic lol..
Anyway, I am fortunate enough to be currently the happiest I have ever been with the sound of my system. It is just enjoyable..no fatigue, massive stage, engaging, etc. My speaker wires in this configuration were lamp cord style Audtek 14ga ofc from a spool from PE. I thought since I’m pretty happy with the sound it would be cool to have some speaker wires that were a little more visually appealing.
Prior to the Audtek, I had been running cci 14ga ofc twisted in-wall wire. I had compared that to a few other inexpensive options at the time and found it the best. Somewhere along the line I switched to the Audtek along with other changes, in a less synergistic setup, so really was unaware if there was any difference.
For no good reason, the baseline Audtek cables were about 20 feet long. I guess I didn’t want to shorten them in the event I needed longer for some reason.
My goal frankly was to add bling and hopefully get the same sound. I had no hopes or expectations of an improvement by switching wires.
I hopped online and found some beautiful wire that was what I wanted at Knukonceptz. They are mostly a car audio wire company with good quality for the price.
So I ordered enough for two 8’ lengths of 10ga twisted Karma wire and some cable pants and nice bfa connectors. The wire is tin plated ofc. I wasn’t worried about the plating as it probably would be good for corrosion resistance in the connections and audio frequencies are too low for skin effect to really be a big concern.
I made up the cables and put on a few tracks I am very familiar with. I was immediately stunned..in a bad way. The first track I used was Pneuma by Tool off Fear Inocculum. I love this track. It is clean, powerful, and can be massive. Kind of 3d and trippy. That was my experience with the lamp cord style Audtek. Drums, guitar, bass, all authoritative and floor to ceiling, wall to wall and then some. My beautiful new beast mode wires compressed the height to flat. Vocals were quieter and anemic. Things were narrower. The impact was gone. Attack and decay were gone. Imaging was pulled apart to each individual speaker. The sound almost sounded confused. It was not subtle. Trying other loved and familiar tracks of differing genres proved similar. I felt disinterested and eventually fatigued. Things I never had with the lamp cord.
Wondering was it the gauge being too heavy, I switched to a chunk of very similar old wire I had that was 12ga and a different brand. This was Stinger HPM 12ga twisted tin plated ofc. Short story is it was similar. Maybe a hair better, but if it was it wasn’t much. Damn, this wire looked cool too and was thinking maybe I could use that.
Now wondering, was it the tin? Still too thick? I went to the old 14ga cci in-wall ofc I used to use. It was better. Much of the attack was back, the image assembly was better. It was fuller and less fatiguing.
I returned to the 14ga ofc Audtek lamp cord, all 20 feet of a snarly mess, and it was better again. Clearly an improvement over the cci, which was better than the two blingy cables. It brought back all I described that I enjoyed earlier.
So somehow the wire I wanted to replace was found to be irreplaceable..
Any experience or insight to this is more than welcome.
Comments
The contenders.
I hate to throw shade on your DIY efforts here, but that is exactly what I am going to do. Sighted, subjective comparisons of something like a wire are completely useless except for shits and giggles. Don't trust them!
With that said, a speaker wire is like a black box "component" that lies between your amplifier and speaker. This component can be represented in terms of its electrical properties, that is its resistance, capacitance, and inductance that are places in the circuit with the crossover and drivers. Whether the wire has a certain gauge or how multiple stands are wound into a bundle will have SOME impact on these properties. But it is much like a speaker driver, each driver design will produce a unique set of performance characteristics and you have to measure an example of that driver to know these well (e.g. frequency response, distortion performance, etc.). Drivers follow certain trends in terms of their performance, too, but in fact each brand and model is unique. If a driver is a 6.5" midwoofer with a poly cone you already know some things about it, but none of the details and those details can be important for a proper implementation of said driver, and the cost of the driver can have little to no bearing on the results. The same goes for loudspeaker cabling and interconnects. You can say "14ga stranded zip cord" and I will be able to make some assumptions, but truly knowing exactly how it will perform is best done by measuring the darn stuff! With higher cost cables, the MFG may supply measurements of the RLC values per meter.
The other pseudo-electrical characteristic of interconnects and speaker wire are how good of a receiver, or antenna, it will be for RF energy. This is an especially important parameter for interconnects, but speaker wire can also pick up noise and energy and deliver it to the output end of your amp. This is not simple to measure, and probably out of the range of possibilities for a DIYer to make quantitative measurements but qualitative and comparative hum and noise pickup measurements might be possible by using a reference wire or just by comparing a bunch of different ones and making a measurement when they are placed next to an old transformer that radiates out lots of EM energy. Or other suitable source of noise. Your choice.
You can also find some measurements and comparisons of speaker wire online. There is one by Archimago:
http://archimago.blogspot.com/2015/06/measurements-speaker-cables-wires.html
at least one over at Audioholics:
https://www.audioholics.com/gadget-reviews/speaker-cable-reviews-faceoff-2
and this thread from ASR:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/speaker-cables.25673/page-6#post-879277
Always try to use the shortest practical length of speaker wire.
My personal choice is multi-stranded OFC copper "zip wire", in 14GA when the length will be a couple of meters, in 12GA if the power is over 1kW (rare), and for shorter connections within the speaker I use the 16GA version.
Avoid CCA wire, it's usually much lower quality and aluminum is a worse conductor than copper but is much cheaper. CCA = copper coated aluminum. Instead get OFC = oxygen-free high-purity copper.
Don't forget that the connection of the wire to the amp and speaker is also very important. I see you used those molded plastic dual banana plugs in one pic. I have had problems with those in the past, sometimes the screw loosened, etc. but I did not realize until much later when I was disassembling things! Banana plugs are totally fine, but use a decent quality one.
Thanks Charlie. Yeah I gotta don my flame suit posting something like this. Thing is though the new cables noticeably sucked. Night and day. And any hopes and bias would have been that they sounded the same and looked better. Cuz they are just wires.
I truly wanted them to sound the same because I wanted to use them.
For sure the other two were much more subjective in comparison. But this was clear. I know these debates are get the popcorn.. but it was obvious. All I can assume is a difference in capacitance and conductor makeup (tinned copper vs bare copper).
Just to be clear all of them are ofc, I don’t buy cca wire. When I said cci I mean the brand is cci. Southwire now I think.
Kimber had a demonstration last year at Axpona, and I had them do it blind, and I could pick out the better cable every time. Now did they have some EQ in the chain to make it sound different, I can't say.
I'll be honest - I don't even remember what brand my current speaker cables are. I think I bought some lower tier Kimber cables years ago and I may have some older Audio Quest cables stashed away. I'm going to have to try some swapping and see if I hear any difference between the name brands and the cheap Chinese stuff I bought on Amazon.
Twisted pair can increase capacitance, but not sure how much. Zippy cord is probably best.
When doing sighted, subjective reviews like this people tend to expect there to be a difference. And, alas, your bain successfully finds them as a result. This is a form of confirmation bias in that the results met your expectations - you expected to perceive a difference in sound, and the result is that you believe you did hear a difference in sound. The fact it was a different ordering of results is less important than the fact you did "hear" a difference.
I didn't read all of Charlie's post, but in essence the RLC properties of a cable completely encapsulates their performance. Basic mathematics from those properties will tell you if their performance over the audible bandwidth exceeds our threshold of audibility for deviations in frequency response. In all but the most extreme (often intentional) cases, the answer is they won't.
That said,
You sir have impeccable taste in music!
Thanks JR, I also read that wire area (gauge? Strand diameter?) can affect it and see that jacket material can play a role. Maybe a perfect storm of something that doesn’t jive with my amp either?
That is interesting to me, I feel like conventional marketing of cabling has biased me to automatically think twisted would be better.
I guess that is what is weird to me is I didn’t expect a difference. I didn’t want a difference. And every time I switched I wanted to convince myself there wasn’t one but couldn’t do it. If anything I would have expected if there was one that the shorter, heavier, twisted cable would be the better one. Weird.
Thank you, and I assume based on this comment that you also have impeccable taste in music!
I appreciate everybody’s feedback. This is the only forum I would consider for a second posting this as the members are good people and there is no bs. Even when doubting or denying my observations, it is posted in a respectful and informative manner. That almost never happens on a forum, especially in a thread on such a controversial topic. Thank you all, you all rock!
Just a thought ...
What goes around comes around.
What if the cables in question could be boxed up and sent around to various forum members for their own impression? Ol Norm's pass-arrounds, so to speak. Keep the cables for a week or two, listen, keep notes in private not posting to forum, then send them on to the next person on the list. So on and so on. When they came full circle, everyone could post their impressions. As a group collective, it would be interesting if some kind of trend developed.
I would check the cables. If it is making that big of a difference through the whole frequency band I worry there is something wrong with the cables. Most of the time it is a connection point.
So Ive been running the same 10/2 Knukonceptz cable for a few years now, completely blinged up. About 3m long, terminated with spades on both ends.
This thread has me curious so I whipped up a set of 2m 10awg zippy cord this morning (thanks insomnia), terminated one end with nanners and the other with spades (dreadnaught does not accept nanners).
I'll give it a listen tonight. I think my lcr meter is sensitive enough to measure cable reactance. Be interesting to see any differences between the two cables.
I remember a time when small gauge cable was all the rage in certain circles. Then there was the CAT-5 craze. I made a set of those, but didn't hear any difference when compared to my budget AudioQuest cables.
Smaller gauge longer runs have a higher DCR, which can alter bass alignment - sometimes considerably. Not saying it was the case here, but there may be a few things compounded leading to the outcome.
@dynamo, do you have a source or preamp with a balance control? Even better is an audio editor with a solo button, though you'll need to copy the same track so that LR each have their own identical signal. Audacity handles this easily.
You can do the same test with stereo by having your helper either match cables or swap just one side at random. If you can't hear an imaging difference (including a narrow phantom center with mono) with mismatched cables, they're doing little or nothing to the sound.
That night/day difference should prove a LOT harder to spot.
This is a good thought. I did make arrangements for a second set of ears.
Cool, interested to hear your experience.
Obviously you will listen to what you are familiar with, but in the event you want to try my tracks, they were:
Tool - Pneuma (whole track but especially from 8:30 and on)
Fourplay - Max-o-man from about 3:30 on
Chicane - Saltwater
Carolyn No - Crystal Ball
Amp is a class ab JBL Synthesis S400. For a more common amp to compare it to, the guts are nearly identical to a Parasound hca1200ii.
Speakers are old two-ways with vifa d27tg45 and dual vifa pl18wo. 2nd order elec cross both ways with reasonable 4 ohm-ish impedance and phase within +/- 30 deg.
That’s a lot of great info. I don’t have a balance control but may be able to use a speaker selector wired up with both sets to the same speakers. I’ll look into that.
Oh, also a good hazy ipa is required test equipment too (might be part of my issue lol)..
Mmmm IPA.
Confirmation bias works both ways, in that it has been demonstrated that individuals who believe the won't hear a difference will not. I wish that I could remember the study where they were to compare amplifiers, but instead switched speakers i and those who believed they wouldn't hear a difference did not, even though the speakers were different brands.
I can confirm that I am biased against hazy IPA's
So, you guys aren't cryogenically processing your silver cables ???
At the minimum, twist a set with the negative copper, and the positive silver wire.
I just keep mine in the freezer.
I still have a couple 100 feet of various Speakon cables out in the garage. It was -7 yesterday morning. Does that count?
Tempering parts or cables I don't see as ineffective. It does something to them, null changes or not.
Audible? I doubt it.
InDIYana Event Website
It is a practice used for improving durability of blades.
I of course was just playin’ around. But I may have to give the cooper / silver a go for the heck of it - I’d think it may actually audible - in a negative way.
Many many moons ago there was a long thread on Audio Asylum about generic 14/3 extension cord from Home Depot as speaker cable. Folks were convinced that it out performed many mega buck esoteric cables. But it had to be the orange jacket with the black stripe. The “Halloween” cable. And it was directional. The text on the jacket had to read towards the speaker. Or the amp, I don’t remember. 🙄
Now some days of the signs of a cable conversation are coming out lol!