Does Bi-Wiring make a difference?

[psg]

"The bottom line is minimise the speaker line resistance between the amplifier and the speaker and Bobs your Uncle."

I do not have an uncle named Bob, and so the inductance and capacitance of the wire will also affect the signal being fed to the speakers.

Yeah, except 20 KHz is not a high frequency when discussing electromagnetics. Just how much HF content is lost throughwire capacitance anyway? Less than 0.1 dB?

[djk]

In a full sized theater a 5dB loss at 20Khz has been measured in conventional wire.

I would be more concerned with the quality of the insulation in shorter lengths of wire in a home system, teflon does sound different than PVC.

Differences in wire are small, but audible.

It may not pay to play with wire until you have the rest of the system sorted out.

And as always:

All food tastes the same (if you have a zinc deficency), all women kiss the same (if you're a eunuch), VHS and Beta look the same (to Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder), and all amplifers sound the same (to the deaf old men at Stereo Review).

WHO?

Tell the deaf/dumb/blind kid to go play pinball.

[Guest " "]

lots of problems with wire. You have inductance, capacitance, skin effect, chemical reations between the insulator and the conductor, etc. Solve one problem and create another. You can throw rocks at any concept. Take skin effect.....us a 3 AWG wire for the woofer and you are good for 75 amps and up to 500hz......a 13 AWG for the mid driver and your are good for 7.4 amps and up to 5300hz.....a 19 AWG wire for the tweeter and your good for 1.8 amps upt to 21 khz. But with all this solid core wire...some would say you will have noise...so now you need twisted pairs....but if you have twisted pairs...now you need a dielectric core to keep the conductors X distance aparts so their inductance does not factor in...but now that you have multiple conductors...now you need magnet wire becuase with out the enamel insultation, the elextrons bleed over to adjacent surfaces and you loose the benifet of the twisted pair concept since the electrons won't spin around the twists but rather just ride the contact areas right down the mddle.....then when you finally have all this figured out...now you need to battery bias your wires with a battery so that they stay charged so you can forgo the 200 hrs warm up time the wires need so they don't sound dark....well to battery bias and not cuase a short circut in your speakers and your amp...you have to battery bias each run seperately...you need a battery to bias the + side of the wires seperate from the battery to bias the - side of the wires....now your in deep shit becuase you need yet another set of wires to complete the new circut in parallel to the speaker wire....but since that can pick up noise too...you got to twist that....then since you twisted it..you need enamel wire so you don't ride the middle all the way down...now you need 2 batteries on each side and you are up to 4 batteries and 4 additional runs of magnet wire in addition to the 6 runs we talked about earleir....need to stuff all that into a black garden hose so it looks pretty and use some rubber boots on each end from an old set of motocycle shock absobers so they look macho.

that should do it....don't forget to platinum plate everything...any other problems you need solved?

[StephenM]

Take skin effect.....us a 3 AWG wire for the woofer and you are good for 75 amps and up to 500hz......

According to your chart, skin effect starts at 500Hz with a 3 AWG wire, ie skin depth is not 100% of the wire. However, this doesn't tell us at which point it would be an audible problem with a specific loudspeaker (ie the point at which the resistance at a particular frequency becomes significant). Either way, in practice with actual stranded speaker wire (not sure who would use solid wire for speakers???), it seems to be a non-issue.

http://www.audioholics.com/education/cables/skin-effect-relevance-in-speaker-cables/skin-effect-relevance-in-speaker-cables-page-2

Actual measured loss of a typical 12 gauge wire into a 2 ohm load at 20kHz was 0.142dB.

The 75 amps figure would also appear to be bunk, at least for the purposes of discussing speaker wire. Even the 14 AWG wire in most homes is rated by the National Electrical Code to carry 15 amperes as opposed to the 5.9 in your table. I would expect for the purposes of speaker wire, where significant peaks would be for a small fraction of a second (versus the relatively constant load of delivering power to a vacuum for example), that even more current could be accommodated without issue. I would also think that the relatively thin internal wiring of the speaker (voice coils and such) would be far more a limiting factor, but that's another story.

some would say you will have noise

Who (beyond exotic wire salesmen) says we will have significant noise from an ordinary speaker wire? What is the noise measured from ordinary stranded speaker wire?

[Guest " "]

According to your chart, skin effect starts at 500Hz with a 3 AWG wire,

that's what I get out of the chart. So my thinking is that if you use 3 AWG wire for a LF section that just has to handle 40hz to 500hz, it would be uninfluenced by skin effect.

likewise, trying to use 3 AWG wire for a mid driver that has to handle 500hz to 5000hz now creates a senerio in which skin effect is a factor. So you need a different wire gauge for 500hz to 5000hz. etc

Actual measured loss of a typical 12 gauge wire into a 2 ohm load at 20kHz was 0.142dB.

I appreciate this type of info....but I have to take the position that there's an accepted assumption that technology folks have measurements that can be displayed on instruments for everything the ear can hear or the eye can see. I do not believe there is enough understanding of how the ear and mind works to explain why some folks can detect a musical difference between 1 AWG litz wire and 8 AWG solid core wire. Case in point....take the inductors used in the ALK ES5800 network.....they use litz wire inductors instead of the standard solid core inductors. No measurements can explain why everyone insist the litz wire sounds better than traditional solid core. On instrurments, they both look the same.

[StephenM]

o my thinking is that if you use 3 AWG wire for a LF section that just has to handle 40hz to 500hz, it would be uninfluenced by skin effect.


likewise, trying to use 3 AWG wire for a mid driver that has to handle 500hz to 5000hz now creates a senerio in which skin effect is a factor. So you need a different wire gauge for 500hz to 5000hz. etc

My understanding is a bit different. Skin effect is the issue of high frequency signals traveling only on the skin of the wire as opposed to the whole depth; it is an issue because it raises the effective resistance of a wire at higher frequencies. Yet with your hypothetical 3 AWG wire, even if the skin depth were a scant 10 percent, it still has more cross sectional area (and resultingly lower resistance) than a 12 AWG wire. As is my understanding, this resistance should still be insignificant. Perhaps you can shed a little more light?

I appreciate this type of info....but I have to take the position that there's an accepted assumption that technology folks have measurements that can be displayed on instruments for everything the ear can hear or the eye can see. I do not believe there is enough understanding of how the ear and
mind works to explain why some folks can detect a musical difference
between 1 AWG litz wire and 8 AWG solid core wire.

So the manufacture of speaker wire is black magic? I have been duped by all the engineers saying RLC alone is what matters for speaker wire? Are people seriously using 1 AWG litz or 8 AWG solid core wire as speaker cable?????????

Case in point....take the inductors used in the ALK ES5800 network.....they use litz wire inductors instead of the standard solid core inductors. No measurements can explain why everyone insist the litz wire sounds better than traditional solid core. On instrurments, they both look the same.

I'd be interested in more information here, ie the specifics on the wire and how they actually measured for R, L, and C (I'd be surprised if they were truly identical), and how the listening tests were performed.

[Don Richard]

Who (beyond exotic wire salesmen) says we will have significant noise from an ordinary speaker wire? What is the noise measured from ordinary stranded speaker wire?

Wire varies in it's tendency to couple to noise sources, and amplification equipment varies in it's tendency to amplify noise introduced via speaker wire. The components in a passive crossover can also couple to noise sources and be amplified through the speaker connections. Here are graphs and other information on that subject:

http://www.eetimes.com/design/audio-design/4015821/Loudspeakers-Effects-of-amplifiers-and-cables--Part-5?pageNumber=1

[Don Richard]

I do not believe there is enough understanding of how the ear and mind works to explain why some folks can detect a musical difference between 1 AWG litz wire and 8 AWG solid core wire. Case in point....take the inductors used in the ALK ES5800 network.....they use litz wire inductors instead of the standard solid core inductors. No measurements can explain why everyone insist the litz wire sounds better than traditional solid core. On instrurments, they both look the same.

Inductors made from Litz wire will have a different Q than inductors made from solid wire. That's why Al uses them in his crossovers.

Litz wire has less skin effect than plain wire and is often used in RF circuitry for that reason.

[StephenM]

Thanks for the read Don.

I do have a few thoughts/comments:

1. The TAD 2001 driver referenced in the original experiment is an extremely sensitive model, rated for 109dB w/ 1 watt @ 1 meter. In the test, the input signal to the driver was such that it would reproduce 70dB at 1 meter. IOW, power flowing to the driver was on the order of one ten thousandth of a watt. I can see why EMI could be an issue in this circumstance, especially when they exacerbate things by performing the test in an office building at city center. Of course even in this situation, Plot C (parallel conductors, 5 meters) looks reasonable enough considering the circumstances, and especially when one compares it to the imperfect output of the amplifier itself. Of course the 50 meter run is abysmal, but I'm not sure how this is relevant to our purposes.

2. I'm a little disappointed in the follow up test. It appears that they only bothered to test with a lengths of 28 meters and they don't mention the drivers used or even their sensitivity to get a rough idea of power going through the wires.

[DrWho]

In a full sized theater a 5dB loss at 20Khz has been measured in conventional wire.

And the physics describing that behavior are very well known. There is no magic about that loss.

I would be more concerned with the quality of the insulation in shorter lengths of wire in a home system, teflon does sound different than PVC.

Differences in wire are small, but audible.

So you can walk into a room and identify the type of dielectric being used in the wires? []

Better yet, can you identify the wire dielectric that was used to make the recording too?

Pray tell, let's quantify what kind of system is good enough to resolve this level of detail. What speaker in the world, let alone room is going to be more accurate than these imagined wire differences?

I honestly want to know, because then I'll get such an environment set up here at work so that we can better analyze the design decisions we make on a daily basis.

[djk]

"So you can walk into a room and identify the type of dielectric being used in the wires? Better yet, can you identify the wire dielectric that was used to make the recording too? "

No, it has to be a side-by-side test.

I can do blind with amps and CD players, but with wire the differences are smaller.

"Pray tell, let's quantify what kind of system is good enough to resolve this level of detail. What speaker in the world, let alone room is going to be more accurate than these imagined wire differences?"

The first time I auditioned interconnects it was with an Advent receiver and a pair of Spectrum 108 loudspeakers, good low-fi. As I said before, the differences while audible, are not large. With better gear you can resolve differences easier. The point is to avoid things that you know don't work well. In a batch of very different cables, two sounded substantially the same. The wire was very different, but the RCA plugs were the same. We concluded the plug made more of a difference than the wire. The cheap Radio Shack plugs with a plastic handle sounded better than any of the 'audiophile' plugs. All the expensive audiophile interconnects were sold and a better CD played was purchased with the proceeds of the sale.

"I honestly want to know, because then I'll get such an environment set up here at work so that we can better analyze the design decisions we make on a daily basis. "

I can't help you with that, I find test equipment to be of little or no use in determining audio quality.

I'll continue this later.

[Guest " "]

Inductors made from Litz wire will have a different Q than inductors made from solid wire. That's why Al uses them in his crossovers.

my point exactly....litz wire has greater mass than solid core (wire plus paint around each conductor vs wire and paint around one inductor) ...so we declare inductance devided by mass equals flux capacitor factor X and then compare that to the flux capacitor factor Y of solid core and conclude the lower the number sometimes is more gooder or the higher number is more gooder.

Litz wire has less skin effect than plain wire and is often used in RF circuitry for that reason.

exactly...see the chart for the corelation between wire dia and skin effect frequency.

So now we can say that bi or tri wiring with different awg wires has a different Q if you use multiple guage wire than if you use standard wire of all the same awg wires in their wire bundle. Now, is more Q's better or is less Q's better.

What about R, C, I, and probally Z's

reminds me of a nature show I once saw. they gave a low ranking monkey a trash can lid. the monkey learned that if he made noise with the trash can lid, he was the badest monkey in the tribe and he became the alpha monkey and started making baby monkey's. Then they gave another low ranking monkey an empty olive 5 gallon oil container and the low ranking monkey quickly lerned that the empty 5 gallon olive oil container makes a heck of a lot more noise than the trash can lid. After some noise contest's the lower ranking monkey with the 5 gallon oilive oil container became the new alpha monkey and he started to make baby mokeys. Point being, our minds are wired to belive that introducing a different cuase, will always produce a new effect. Today we apply math to these factors and assume that the math can be used to predict an improvement. Or we use the math to justify that there can't be an improvement.