copper cable

[Harry Bissell]

Until I read the "holy wars" line I was afraid you took me seriously... Harry
Bob Pease had a nice write-up on this topic in his "What's all this... anyway" Maybe
I can find it....

Tim Ressel wrote:

> (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