cable length?

[newatthis]

Is it true that the left and right speaker cable should be the same length? Could different lengths affect what you hear?

[caughtup]

Hi ! I have a buddy that's this older gent down in SC who is a serious audiphile, makes his own cables yadda yadda... he could prolly hear a major difference in cable length. This months MIX Mag had a comment about Ray Charles hearing1/4 dB of a low end problem in the playback monitors at the studio... most normal people hear2-3 or3-4 dB differences... after years of training I'm sure there are people on this forum able to hear 1dB issues. For your cable question I'm of the opinion that a few inches/feet even of the SAME gauge cable/wire won't skew too bad.. if you have two different gauges and lengths you may pan things funny or find yourself with strange EQ differences ha ha just kidding.
always speaker placement is more critical than most people believe( i'm talking home listeners not seasoned engineers, all of them I've met or worked with have been fanatical about equidistant speakers with identical reflection around them, the best being...none.)
be well mix right hold on sleep tight!
bye
Jeff

[Brad Blackwood]

If one cable was several hundred miles longer than the other, perhaps it would be audible....

[Tim Farrant]

The correct answer to this question is;

Because you don't know if it makes a difference or not, cut them the same length, then you WON"T have a problem - you can rest assured that both cables are identical, and get on with something more important like getting the room acoustics symmetrical!

Thats my theory on the subject anyways.

Tim

[zemlin]

A length difference of 186 miles will result in a .001 second delay between one speaker an the other.

A millisecond delay is audible - but the several nanoseconds you would get from a reasonable length difference will be far from audible.

I suppose someone could claim capacitance difference between the cables, but as long as you're using decent cable (12 ga. zip cord) I won't believe anyone who claims to hear a difference.

Any difference heard would be due to the capacitance in their head - not the cables.

[tINY]

There could be a noticable difference if the length difference is a couple of feet with a tube amp and really tweeky speakers with low impedance regions. But. these are already bad set-ups in a lot of ways...

Typically, if you are using solid state amplifiers and reasonable speakers (in terms of minimum impedance), then 20 feet isn't going to matter with #16 AWG. The biggest effect is damping factor. The impedance of the wire is effecticvely added to the source impedance of the amp and the damping factor is lowered.

See

http://www.cardinalproaudio.com/main/speaker.htm
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm


You'll read all sorts of claims on speaker wire, and you probably can hear the difference with esoteric amps and speakers. Not because they sound better. but because they have unusual charateristics like high-impedance output transformers and particularly low impedances in certain frequency bands of the speakers


-tINY