copper cable

[Tim Ressel]

(The Holy Wars begin...)

Harry Wrote:
>... so I always use 4-0 gage Litz wire (with
>thousands of INDIVIDUALLY INSULATED strands in parallel to eliminate "skin
>effect" and other inductive artifacts...

Um, "skin effect" is an RF phenomenon and not usually found in the 0-20k range.
Litz wire is used to minimize inter-winding capacitance in RF coils.

I suspect what you are hearing is an increase in damping caused by the huge wire
you are using. It works like this: A speaker (motor) wants to act like a
generator when it doesn't quite do what the amplifier wants it to do. The
amplifier feedback circuit "sees" the energy generated by the voice coil and
tries to correct it. Now the system damping i.e. its ability to correct, is
affected by amplifier effective impedance, voice coil resistance, and wire
resistance. If the wire is small and lossy, damping goes down. If the wire is
huge and ultra-low resistance, then damping is maximized.

>I suppose you mere MORTALS may not be able to hear EVERYTHING I
>do...   so make your own judgement from that...

The upshot of all of this for us mortals who cannot afford $10/inch wire is: Use
the biggest, highest quality wire you can afford, use the shortest length of
wire you can, DO NOT LOOP EXTRA WIRE!!, make sure your connections at the
amplifier and speaker and very sound (no pun intended). If you run 4/0 welding
wire and then connect to a lug designed for 18ga wire ... well, you get the
idea.

Good Hunting!

--Tim Ressel