I'm setting up my gear in my new lounge, and because of the very unideal room layout, I'm trying to work out best options for hooking it up.
I'll have my media centre/dac/TT etc in the corner of the room nearest the listening position, the speakers on the far side of the room. To keep things neat and not have wires all over the floor, there's about a 10m run from stack to speakers (going along the walls).
I've read wildly contradictory advice as to which run should be longest - interconnect or speaker wire.
To me it seems clear the it's better to have longer speaker wire -- assuming decent thick wire, over 10m the resistance is negligible, like 10 mOhms per meter. Capacitance and inductance are miniscule. Voltages are in the few to say 20V ptp. Very low impedance source and resistance. So doubt a 10m cable itself could do much different to what a 5m cable would do (the binding posts, etc are prob the main problem causers). Noise from conductor would be vanishingly small, You'd need something seriously wrong to be able to induce significant noise into the cable.
The interconnect is from high impedance source to sink, and very small voltages (few tens to hundreds of millivolts), and while the wire itself is coax and assuming decent quality cable, almost immune to outside interference and negligible reactance/resistance, the RCA plugs and sockets are pretty mucky. So noise and interference arguably a problem.
So then why in most high end installs are the power amps by the speakers with long interconnect runs? Cause it looks fancy?
Which is better -- or is it much of a muchness.
(Thorough analysis of interconnect length vs speaker cable length -- a vendor, so pinch of salt, but bottom line up to 10m or so it doens't seem to really matter http://www.empiricalaudio.com/computer-audio/audio-faqs/short-versus-long-cables)
(Good analysis of electrical parameters here - bottom line, corner freq where things become problematic is really really high http://www.opusklassiek.nl/audiotechniek/cables.htm)
I'll have my media centre/dac/TT etc in the corner of the room nearest the listening position, the speakers on the far side of the room. To keep things neat and not have wires all over the floor, there's about a 10m run from stack to speakers (going along the walls).
I've read wildly contradictory advice as to which run should be longest - interconnect or speaker wire.
To me it seems clear the it's better to have longer speaker wire -- assuming decent thick wire, over 10m the resistance is negligible, like 10 mOhms per meter. Capacitance and inductance are miniscule. Voltages are in the few to say 20V ptp. Very low impedance source and resistance. So doubt a 10m cable itself could do much different to what a 5m cable would do (the binding posts, etc are prob the main problem causers). Noise from conductor would be vanishingly small, You'd need something seriously wrong to be able to induce significant noise into the cable.
The interconnect is from high impedance source to sink, and very small voltages (few tens to hundreds of millivolts), and while the wire itself is coax and assuming decent quality cable, almost immune to outside interference and negligible reactance/resistance, the RCA plugs and sockets are pretty mucky. So noise and interference arguably a problem.
So then why in most high end installs are the power amps by the speakers with long interconnect runs? Cause it looks fancy?
Which is better -- or is it much of a muchness.
(Thorough analysis of interconnect length vs speaker cable length -- a vendor, so pinch of salt, but bottom line up to 10m or so it doens't seem to really matter http://www.empiricalaudio.com/computer-audio/audio-faqs/short-versus-long-cables)
(Good analysis of electrical parameters here - bottom line, corner freq where things become problematic is really really high http://www.opusklassiek.nl/audiotechniek/cables.htm)
