Newsgroups: rec.audio.tech Subject: Re: coax speaker cable? References: <[email protected]> [email protected] writes: > Hello all > > I have heard that generally coaxial cable is good to avoid loses and > have a clean signal, so my question is: Does a coak cable for the > speakers make any difference? Not in any considerable way. For the speaker cable the necessary parameters are the speaker cable resistance and impedance, sometimes also capacitance. The resistance is determined by the material (practically always very similar copper) and the areas of the conductors. Normal coaxial cables are not particularly large in the wire meterial area compared to their size. So in this sense coaxial might not be optimum (unless specifically manufacturer to have lots of copper). The coaxial construction has very low cable inducatance, which is basically good. The downside of it is the high capacitance (higher than normal cables), which can be problematic with some audio amplifiers (some not very good amplifiers do not like very capacitive load and might become unsable if very high capacitance cable is connected). The end results is that coaxial cable might be quite usable as speaker cable. It has it good sides and it's downsides. If the capacitance is not problem to your amplifier, you want to minimize the inductance and your copper cable is constructed so that it has low resistance (thick copper), then coaxial cable might be the best choice as a speaker cable. In other cases normal wire pair is generally the best around all choice on both general characteristics and price. > in principle I would say yes, but I'm not > an expert, and second: does it make any difference between the elements > of a stereo system? (i.e. between cd and amplifier, etc..) Normal shielded audio cables used in home audio systems use coaxial construction for those interconnections. The cable is constructed like a coaxial cable (center conductor, insulation and outer shield conductor), but their high frequency properties (not neededin analugue audio) are not so well specified like in "real" coaial cables). You can build audio equipment interconnections very well using normal 75 ohm or 50 ohm coaxial cables without problems. They perform about the same, little worse or somewhat better in those applications as any gnenral purpose as a general audio cable. No major difference. I have build audio interconnection cables usign various cables designed for audio and also from different coaxial cables I have had lying around. -- Tomi Engdahl (http://www.iki.fi/then/) Take a look at my electronics web links and documents at http://www.epanorama.net/
