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What exactly is Zip Cord ?


SonofJames

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16 hours ago, captainbeefheart said:

For the fella trying to measure his wire gauge with a tape measure that's not accurate enough because you would then need to know insulation thickness to subtract from the total diameter.

Not what I was doing, surprised that you thought so with all the brainpower you share so tactfully here!

Was trying to note the bulkiness of that ten gauge. Just won't run that stealthily along the baseboard, even if sleeved. Think it would be better suited for a sub.

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4 hours ago, JohnJ said:

Not what I was doing, surprised that you thought so with all the brainpower you share so tactfully here!

Was trying to note the bulkiness of that ten gauge. Just won't run that stealthily along the baseboard, even if sleeved. Think it would be better suited for a sub.

 

Lol, I don't know about all the "brainpower",  your post clearly went over my head. For that I do apologize.

 

I have 20kV rated wire for certain projects and it looks like it's 10awg wire due to the very thick silicone insulation needed for the 20kV rating but it's really just 22awg wire.

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1 hour ago, captainbeefheart said:

 

Lol, I don't know about all the "brainpower",  your post clearly went over my head. For that I do apologize.

 

I have 20kV rated wire for certain projects and it looks like it's 10awg wire due to the very thick silicone insulation needed for the 20kV rating but it's really just 22awg wire.

Higher voltage = lower Amperage

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On 11/2/2022 at 7:36 AM, JohnJ said:

10 Gauge ?

PXL-20221102-143219613.jpg

 

Karma Kable!  Very fine-stranded copper conductors, individually tinned to eliminate corrosion and reduce skin effect.  I use 8 gauge for the woofers and 10 gauge for the tweeters.  There's also a thick clear sheath over the two insulated conductors.

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On 11/3/2022 at 5:09 PM, Travis In Austin said:

If that white stuff is considered by most to be "zip cord" than I stand corrected. In my limited world it was always brown, always 12 AWG, and, as Mark mentioned, always very easy to separate. 

 

But if that is in fact zip cord by everyone's definition, and it looks like it is, what else would it be besides "zip cord. Has anyone seen anything else on the inside of other speakers that wasn't zip cord?

 

My recollection is that PWK used the term "lamp cord" for external speaker wire, but I have not been able to find that Dope From Hope yet. 

 

The lamp cord that I'm familiar with is white or brown, and always 18 or 16 gauge, never anything thicker.  The strands are medium thick, which cause the wire to be medium stiff.  It will hold a shape if it's bent or curled, so it will often need to be physically straightened to use its full length.  I never heard it called zip cord before I joined the Forum.

 

Speaker cord, on the other hand, has a very wide spectrum of sizes, from clear-jacketed 22 or even 24 gauge that low-end A/V shops will throw in with every pair of speakers they sell, to heavy stuff that looks like garden hose, with every variety of insulation ("No!  It's called dielectric!") all the way to nothing, in the Tara Labs "vacuum-insulated" wires that are priced well north of $10,000 for a pair of short  ones.  Sorry, they're interconnects, not speaker cables.  They were called The Zero, but sure enough, a magazine tested those wires and the jackets didn't contain vacuum.  They didn't contain nothing, they had some air in them. Tara Labs' explanation was that it's not hard vacuum, like you find in space, it's very thin air, like you'd find at the top of a very tall mountain, like 12,000 feet high.

 

Here's the link to the Stereophile test.  About the bottom of Page 2, you'll see the comment about how the air at 12,000 feet is not even close to a vacuum.

 

https://www.stereophile.com/cables/1206tara/index.html

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On 11/4/2022 at 2:06 PM, captainbeefheart said:

 

Only in relation to a constant wattage value.

 

V*I=W

 

Your statement is incorrect if load resistance is constant, say 100 ohms. With voltage from 100v to a higher 200v amperage hasn't been lowered, it increased from 1 amp to 2 amps.

 

 

 

 

That is not cogent to a speaker application

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37 minutes ago, the real Duke Spinner said:

That is not cogent to a speaker application

 

How do you figure?

 

Given a specific frequency and it's subsequent impedance, say 8 ohms at 800Hz; Are you trying to say that if you increase the signal amplitude across the load that current will decrease?

 

The world I live in when you increase amplitude across a specific load impedance current increases. I can't see why anyone would think otherwise.

 

My friend is an electrician by trade and he tried making the same argument due to his findings with electric motors. What he needed to understand was the motor power stays the same so yes at 240v there will be half the current compared to 120v.

 

With a speaker doubling the amplitude/voltage say from say 8v to 16v will NOT decrease current, it will increase the current and power. So power does not remain constant.

 

8v across 8 ohms is 8 watts. 1 amp of current times 8v = 8

 

16v across 8 ohms is 32 watts. 2 amps of current times 16v = 32

 

Or simply divide load into voltage2.

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