OMG If You Coil Your Speaker Cable You're Gonna Lose Fidelity?!?

can you coil speaker cables behind your speaker or will it affect the performance of your system that's the question we're going to be answering in today's video all right my friend so i have these cherry audio cables they're called the mega snake i'm jean de la saller audioholics in case you didn't know in fact make sure you subscribe use that bell notification so you can get more videos like this normally we deal with home theater stuff but i have to keep covering the cable stuff so it occurred to me while i was measuring these cables what would happen if you coil it would it act like an inductor would it cause problems and it was a good opportunity for me to test this because i just got this new toy from wayne kerr it's called the magnetic analyzer an lcr meter now in the past i had a larger version of this i had the 6240 or whatever the model was um and that was that thing tested out to like a megahertz this one's a smaller more compact one i went to go and basically send my unit in for calibration and then i decided maybe i should get something smaller to fit on my desk at the new audiohog smart house this tests out to 100 kilohertz it measures every parameter you can think of for a cable it goes with your inductance which is ls with your resistance which is rdc and then rac or rs which is your series resistance in the cable as a function of frequency and then capacitance as well it does the parallel capacitance so basically taking this meter will allow me to understand exactly what's going on with the cable how good of a cable it is the performance of it gives me all the attributes sadly most of the exotic cable vendors don't have these kind of tools they just make cables based on whimsical evidence on what they think sounds better but you know as an engineer you need to have the right engineering tools to understand how a system works and that's why we invest in the time to do measurements and we invest in the equipment to make sure we can accurately do said measurements so here we are we have this cable this is an interesting cable to braided cable it's a six conductor i think each conductor is 14 gauge so the equivalent gauge of this cable is about nine gauge um i did the measurements on and i'm going to share my screen with you guys so you can kind of see what i'm looking at here and then we could go over whether or not you could coil that speaker cable and if it's going to affect the performance of your system so without further ado let me get on the screen share business okay so here we have basically a list of cables that i've measured recently and i've kind of tabulated all the results different brands different prices the ls rscp parameters of each cable i'm going to put this cable down for a minute so the one i'm looking at now is this cherry mega snake it actually is a pretty good performing cable the inductance is relatively low the resistance is low actually measured probably closer to about 10 gauge it's close enough it's you know i get some contact resistance from the connectors that i couldn't take off i didn't want to damage the cable so i would i'll give it to him it's probably really closer to nine gauge equivalent so i took the inductance measurements because think about when you take a piece of wire and you coil it that's really how you make an inductor although an inductor in order for it to be really effective it has to be a tightly wound coil of very thin wire um lots of turns you can't do these kind of turns with a 10-foot speaker cable and you either have an air core or you have a ferrite core different kinds of core material depending on what you're trying to do so the question is if you take some excess cable behind your speaker or behind your amplifier and you coil it up like most people tend to do is it going to be an effect an effective inductor and is it going to cause high frequency loss or just degradation of the audio signal so basically if you look at this cable that i measured this um cable from cherry audio the mega snake i plotted the inductance versus frequency from 100 hertz out to 100 kilohertz so i took it as a straight cable and then i coiled it up like i was holding it just before and i measured it again and as you could see there was an increase in inductance but it's really i mean if you think about it like at what at five kilohertz it's like 10 not a huge amount but it's you know you think about well there is an increase in inductance so how is that going to affect the frequency response okay so if you know basic circuit design and you look at the cable as an inductor and you look at the load of the speaker as a resistor we're trying to simplify things here for argument's sake it's basically a first order rl network so you have an 8 ohm speaker or you have a 4 ohm speaker i'm assuming the cable is about 20 feet in length that's twice the the length of the cable that i have here so you take that inductance i took it at 1 kilohertz for that that's at one foot that's .118 micro henries per foot and i multiplied that by 20 and that's how i came up with 2.36 micro henries okay and i'm going to zoom in on this in case you guys can't see it good enough there we go so hopefully you guys can see this a little bit better so here we go we got a 20-foot piece of cable straight wire is it got about 2.36 micro hemorrhoids of inductance that same cable coiled up about 2.56 micro henry so there's a little bit of an increase so now if you look at if you're trying to figure out how much loss you have it's a very basic formula for this it's basically the resistance divided by two pi times the inductance and what i did was i plugged these numbers in and for 20 foot length of cable on an 8 ohm load straight wire the 3 db point meaning the signals drops 3 db relative to its pass band is at a whopping 539 kilohertz way past the audio band the audio band it stops at around 20k most people can't even hear up to 20k especially with age so that's well beyond what you would worry about the inductance causing losses in the cable take that same cable same inductance now use a 4 ohm load drops at about half it's about 269 kilohertz so what happens now when you use the coiled cable inductance we've got the same length of cable only now it's coiled like i showed you before right here basically we went from 539 kilohertz down to 497 kilohertz inaudibly undetectable no real difference that you have to worry about then you take it down to a forum load and you're still at 248 kilohertz again guys this is well beyond the audio band way beyond anything that you would have to concern yourself about so at the end of the day if you have a speaker cable and we don't we don't encourage you to go out of your way to coil up a cable behind a speaker but if you've got an extra couple of feet of length and you need to coil it to hide it under a speaker or under credenza you're not going to cause any performance degradation in fact i often notice people are trying to make cables as short as they can which is it's good practice to make your cable as short as you can but not at the expense of adding pressure or adding um basically having a cable having too much tension on it you don't want to have tension on a cable you want to make sure that these conduct when you plug the conductor into your speaker you plug it into your amplifier you want it to have a good nice snug fit but you don't want anything pulling on it because the enemy of of signal transmission is when you have contact resistance and if you have this cable being tugged on all the time it could potentially come loose or fall off so always error on the side of caution i always tell people if you think you need a 10 foot speaker cable lens go an extra 10 if you can maybe make it 12 feet get that extra couple of feet you never know if you're going to move a speaker if you need to go and kind of put some slack under the under the speaker under the crenenza and it's a little coil it's not going to be the end of the world you're not going to cause any audible degradation it's not even measurable within the audio band and in fact in future videos i'm going to take these cables and i'm going to take a real speaker and i'm going to use my audio precision and we're going to show you the very miniscule differences in how speaker cables affect the frequency response of the performance so i'm kind of inspired now to do more of these measurements now that we're getting set up here at the audiohawk smart house you're going to be seeing more of these little kind of videos i hope you guys found this useful please make sure you hit that bell notification that way you know when these videos appear don't forget to subscribe to the channel don't forget about our patreon channel at patreon.com audiohall should get direct access to me if you want to ask questions or suggest youtube topics alright guys i hope you enjoyed this video and until next time my friends keep listening

Channel: Audioholics

Views: 74,821

Keywords: cables, speakers, audiophile, wire, hifi, speakercables

Id: 71FObTz9cJQ

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021