Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Should speaker cable length be equal?

Speed of sound 340 meters per second.
Speed of light 300,000,000 meters per second.
one million time faster.
If electricity is ten times slower than light, it is still 100,000 faster. So by the time the current has done 50 meters (150 feets), the sound has done 0.5 millimiter (one fifth of an inch).
THere may be other parameter like resistance of the wire and electrical properties but on speed, nobody can hear the difference on speed only.

Welcome to the forum, pamorin! Thanks for the numbers.

"Kevin, what you were told frankly makes no sense. To the extent that greater "strain" would occur because of a lengthened wire(which is negligible at differences used in the home, as the table shows), it would occur if the shorter(e.g. 10 foot)wire was arbitrarily lengthened(e.g. to 40 feet)to satisfy some meaningless equal-length belief."

Sorry, John, but I'm not making sense of what you're saying here, either. Please explain it further. Are you saying that to match the shorter wire (10' in your example) to the longer one (40') you'd somehow stretch the shorter one out another 30'? Or are you saying that you'd attach another 30' of wire onto the 10' wire so that the left and right wires would now each match 40'? If either one of those descriptions is correct in what you're saying, then you've misread my original point.

As far as the belief being meaningless, I'm sharing what the audiophile who got me started in this hobby shared with me so many years ago, which is that it's good practice to have your left and right speaker cables of equal lenght (or as close as possibly, anyway). By all means, go ahead and run your speakers with two cables of vastly different lenghts. I personally choose not to do it which is why I suggested not doing it here in regards to the original post.

KC,

I was a little confused when I first read JohnK's post, too, but I can explain what he was trying to say.

In all cases, it is better to have a shorter wire than a longer wire, since a shorter wire will present the amp with a lesser load. The benefits of short wire far outweigh the benefits of matching wire lengths. For this reason, having unequal wire lengths is much better than matching lengths to the longest required length.

I think that's clearer.

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Is it an S or an 8? I have a hard time picturing an S, but maybe I'm just dense.

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An S (ESS)... much like I think it was JohnK mentioned about a zig-zag... take the area behind your entertainment stand... rather than coiling it, a better idea (though you still won't notice a difference I'm sure) would be to snake it in an S pattern... like swishing when skiing. Draw a wavy line on a piece of paper and stick it to the bottom of my message (and save me from drawing some terrible ASCII drawing!) *laughs*

Again, it won't make a shred of audible difference to your speaker cables, but if you make a career move into broadcast later in life, it's something to remember... or something to notice if you're ever at a live televised event, you'll notice a good cable puller will have a minimum amount of cable lightly looped and separated over his arm and the rest of his slack will be snaked rather than coiled behind him.

Like most things HT-related, this shouldn't keep you up at night.

Bren R.

OK. An extended series of Ses. I couldn't figure out how to make just one S out of a bunch of cable...

Yes, Kevin, that's exactly why what you were told makes no sense. Sean would arbitrarily have to use a 40' wire on the 10' distance to his closer surround in order to satisfy the, again meaningless for home distances, equal-length requirement. That's what would cause an(insignificant)additional strain on the amp. If the distances in question are significantly unequal, e.g. the 10'/40' here, it's obviously impossible to both have the lengths equal and at the same time no longer than needed.

John- that's why I originally made my statement in regards to a two-channel setup. I think there was some miscommunication here, so no big deal. Moving on.

pmbuko- thanks for helping clear that up for me, too.

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Did you also know that you should never let your wires touch the floor? Luckily, somone invented wonderful products like this to solve that problem...

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http://www.audiotweaks.com/reviews/cblelevators/page01.htm - somebody apparently disagrees with our laughing at these speaker wire stands, then again, it IS a link to a site that suggests packing a receiver in play sand to minimize sympathetic vibrations.

Bren R.

I thought everyone uses the play sand .