Your speaker cable matters! 32 speaker cables tested - with measurements!

hello and welcome to another alpha audio video today I'm going to discuss the huge speaker cable test we did 32 cables and uh over 400 measurements maybe 500 I think it was quite a uh an investigation so to say um we did that test just like the huge Interlink test uh with 32 interlinks because we hear a difference between cables but uh no one actually really investigated deeply why that is uh Maybe I'm Wrong maybe someone did that and I'm sorry if you are watching right now and you did huge task like we did on this loudspeaker cable test with the intelling test we did some measurements uh and some are the same as with uh these speaker cables and some are different because speaker cables are vastly different from inter interconnects and interlinks um the whole environment is different so to say because you have the output impedance of the amplifier say 0.1 ohms and then then you have a loudspeaker with also a very low impedance uh 8 ohm nominal or maybe even 4 ohm nominal and impedance is not straight so it goes all over the place some even dip to 1.5 ohms or something like that and that makes the influence of a cable a lot bigger but strangely enough I think and my colleague Martine agrees that it was less audible I think an Interlink makes a bigger impact on the sound quality than a loudspeaker cable and I don't know why maybe because the current is bigger and maybe the voltage is bigger than with an Interlink that the impact of a loudspeaker cable is less than with an Interlink or an interconnect but we did some measurements and it's all posted on the website uh on paragraph three we did frequency response measurement on the prism with a real loudspeaker and we did a boat plot measurement on the picoscope as well of course with the black box from uh case renberg renberg Consulting with the right impedances and well honestly most speaker cables measure pretty straight if you go for a normal dummy load as soon as you connect a loudspeaker and a real amplifier you see that they actually do differ and the differences are sometimes very small in frequency response and sometimes very big and what I noticed and it's not rocket science in this case is that the higher the impedance of the loudspeaker cable the bigger the differences are becoming and that makes sense because the damping factor of an amplifier is greatly influenced by the impedance of a loudspeaker cable now you can calculate that I did that on the website for you and then you can see that if a loudspeaker cable like this one is the venen hill uh inspiration this one measures pretty low and that's a good thing but this one oh the cloud uh measures pretty high this has an impedance of around 6 ohms now that might sound very low but for a loudspeaker cable that measures 3 m and I measure all the way through the cable so that's 6 M 6 ohms is pretty high and I was wondering if we could hear that well yes you can uh Martine didn't really know what loudspeaker cable was uh attached and I did but I don't know the impact I just measure it I actually don't remember the measurements because there's so many you can actually hear that and it's not that this cable sounds bad it doesn't it sounds pretty good but it feels very different from the inspiration hybrid is the inspiration hybrid is much more loose it's much more neutral the hybrid uh cloud 3T is actually pretty dumped so to say um so impedance is one of the things that really impacts uh sound quality and you can buy 2 and a half mm squared wire that sounds pretty decent but we also had the the Supra classic it's 2 and 1 12 mm squared it's very good for the price I mean it's like4 a meter you can't go wrong with that but is it equally good as a decent uh speaker cable that adds a little bit more luxury no it's not equally good um we had some very cheap cables that sounded pretty good we had some very expensive cables that didn't sound really good but yeah to be fair the best one we had was around ,000 and that's still a lot of money and that's the best one we had had in our system it doesn't mean it's the same in your system but we measured some other stuff so impedance remember that impedance is pretty important for a loudspeaker cable but we also measured pH and that's a weird one because I can't actually draw any conclusions from that because we compared cables in terms of phas and we used a 500 KZ uh sign wave for that um the reason why we use high frequency is explained in the review or in the article um there are differences there are simply differences in Phase but if I wanted to draw any conclusions from that I had to have one Benchmark and then compare all the cables to that Benchmark and then even compare the cables that sound different to each other and that's just too much work in in this case because we have 32 cables I think it I would need to do at least 100 measurements on phase alone uh if I want to have any idea what that means uh but there are differences in phase and it's not related to propagation time nor propagation variance and that's what strikes me because I compared one of the fastest I think it's one of the nordost cables they're really fast uh with one of the slowest and that was the cloud 3 3T and the difference is smaller than with another faster cable so it's not related to that I think it has something to do with capacitance or maybe inductance but even that was not a straightforward answer to why there are differences in phas there just are um one of one of the other measurements with that was striking was noise um I connected the uh tectronic scope to our function generator and I didn't use any signal so it was kind of a system in idle State and what strikes me is that this cable uh this one the Kimber uh carbon 8 I think it was called this one measured vastly different in terms of noise from this one and that's the Kimber 8 PR and the 8 PR is very very silent uh it has to do with the GE geometry and the material used because the geometry is actually quite the same because it's also a Kimber cable but when we swapped the cables what immediately immediately stood out was how silent the Kimber 8pr is it's really black and it also measures very very black there's hardly any noise but with the 8C it's different the carbon 8 isn't really silent and as soon as that cable was in the system I could hear the difference I was like wow this isn't really as black as the 8br now does the 8C sound worse no doesn't uh so it's just what you're looking for if you want a very high energy itic cable uh you don't buy the 8pr because it just isn't a very high energetic cable then you go for I don't know uh Rec it's mnus it's a very energetic dramatic sounding cable so to say very Italian um and with the um audio Quest this was also very uh very funny to see let me grab it because it's a lot of people say that the uh a lot of people say that the DBS system doesn't do anything well that's actually not true because it does um this is the rocket 11 from audio Quest and it sounds very different from for example this very expensive cable from audio Quest this is the firebird zero and uh it's 20 grand is it worth the money that that's up to you but it's it's sounded really good um but all the zero Tech cables had some of the same signature it's very mild in the treble it's very fluid in the mid-range and uh the base is actually not as massive as I'm used to with audio Quest because I owned a audio Quest Oak for a while and it was a very round sounding cables that's that's very different with the zero Tech it's very Nimble and soft and uh actually pretty fast it's it's weird but we measured the noise with and without a DPS system and we did that before on the LCR and yes you see a difference and uh with digital cables you definitely see a difference um but with speaker cables it's really hard to prove that the DBS system does actually do anything with interlinks it's the same but uh I forgot to do it with the interlinks but now I could there is a difference in noise pattern I'm not sure if it's lower but there is a difference in the noise Spectrum the pattern of the noise is difference with different with DBS on and off and you can see it in the article I posted all the measurements in the in the article so you can see it over there um and we did some uh LCR measurements of course but like inductance capacitance and impedance and I could relate some stuff I mean capacitance has an influence on speed and propagation variance simple as that you want a low capacitance and you need a low inductance in order to get the impedance down and with a signal cable like the inlinks that's not really important because impedance doesn't influence the quality of his Interlink not at all because the impedances are already very high the output impedance is low but the input impedance is high so the cable doesn't have any influence in terms of impedance but with speaker cables it does because the both sides are actually pretty low in impedance so if you want a low impedance you need a low inductance and if you want a low inductance the capacitance go up and you get a slower cable so it's kind of a tricky balance that all the producers need to make and uh it's actually really hard to make a good cable and you can say whatever ever you want you can believe in cables or not I don't care I don't sell cables I test cables and like with the ining test most cable producers that actually uh uh send in their cables are not sponsors so please stop saying that I'm bought or that they pay me to say this they don't most of them don't have a business relationship with alpha audio some do and it's not not a secret at all but they know who they send it to they don't actually influence Me by calling me or stopping uh campaigns or anything like that and if they do they do that that's how it works um this was kind of the summary um I thought that the influence of a speaker cable would be higher than with an Interlink it isn't I thought the differences were bigger with the interlinks than with the speaker cables uh that's weird I didn't expect that outcome but it's what it is the biggest influence like I said is impedance and noise you could hear both very very well uh to keep the noise down you need some some some form of special geometry and shielding and stuff like that and that makes it very very hard for a producer to create a neutral sounding cable because everything you put on there has an influence on the outcome um non-shielded cables sound different from shielded cables cables with high impedance sound very different from cables with low impedance in case of speaker cables our next project yes I'm not stopping with cable research yet uh is that I'm going to construct three or four maybe interlinks and uh they all have the same conductor they all have the same geometry but I'm going to swap out the shielding and dilectum dialectric materials uh because I want to know what it does if everything is the same how does a dialectric material and shielding influence sound quality so that's our next project but it will be way after highend Munich because I'm really I need a holiday but first highend munic and then I'm going to take some days off uh because I really need it it it was a very very heavy project um thank you for watching see you next time byebye

Channel: Alpha Audio

Views: 16,735

Keywords: Speaker cables, measurements, audio, hifi, high-end, test, review

Id: 2kb5h1XIb-Y

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2024