Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater QS8 Question re banana plugs

The difference has a lot to do with the higher bandwidth digital signal. Interference, crosstalk, and signal attenuation are a big issue when running at gigabit speeds, and the higher quality Cat-6 cables contain correctly-twisted pairs of conductors and use higher-quality connectors.

Even better!!

I don't fully appreciate the difference, but I won't divert the thread further. Thanks for the info.

This would be due to poor shielding in lesser cables and with automotives, you have a not so great AC generator that has questionable filtering capabilites at best, with lots of RF signals from the engine, which is why shielding is all the more important. For home use, the shielding of low level lines is still important but not as much. This leads to speaker cables which are not shielded at all, well most of them, because the signal to the speakers is a higher voltage and less susceptible to interference.

That explanation I actually understood. Thanks Jake[wash].

On a loosely related topic, for over a year I've been annoyed with the fact that the computer I built with a gigabit NIC would not connect at Gigabit speeds to my router... Since initially screwing around with it when I built the computer (1.5 years ago), I had since given up and stopped thinking about it.

However, I upgraded my router on Cyber Monday (to wireless N) and at that point it began to annoy me again that the computer still wasn't connecting at 1 gbps. Come to find out... the whole time the cable was at fault. It was an old POS Cat5 cable... grabbed a newer Cat6 cable yesterday and voila... 1GBPS connection. I realize this is not an issue of quality, but of spec, but still... After 1.5 years... DUH!

Jason

Zimm, what are you talking about? Tin is a metal with much higher electrical resistance than copper and as far as is known is never used in the electrical wire commonly bought for connecting speakers. It may be called by such generic names as "lamp cord", "power cord", "speaker wire","zip cord", etc. but in all cases it's better than 99.9% pure copper. My own usage has always been 16ga lamp cord connected directly to receiver and speaker terminals.

I remember one time I was setting up a bedroom set up and used an old extension cord for speaker wire, no joke.

I'm pretty sure that even the cheapest lamp cord is copper on both sides with one side tinned, but I can't imagine tin wires. Maybe you're seeing aluminum wire ? I didn't think that was still being used, but maybe I'm just out of touch.

Zimm, there is no such thing as Tin wiring at the Depot. Are you talking about Tin Coating? If so, that is just a coating over the copper to make it easy to keep polarity in line, it is still 99+% copper as JohnK mentions.