[sdiy] "Time Winding" in Audio Cables ???

[Richard Wentk]

At 15:51 11/07/2005, Glen wrote:
>On a totally separate forum, I have a person who has been to all the 
>Monster Cable(tm) sales seminars telling me that low frequencies travel 
>through an audio cable more slowly than the high frequencies. Is this 
>remotely true?

Cables are surprisingly complicated things, and there are some quite subtle 
interactions between amps, cables and speakers that can affect the sound. 
But... you can eliminate most of these just by using a decent enough 
connector cross section.

I always use mains power cable, which has *more* than enough cross section 
for accurate audio. In fact I challenge anyone to tell the difference 
between Monster Cable (tm), any other specialist cable, and cooker cable in 
a double blind test.

The low frequencies claim is bull. A long enough section of cable can 
potentially act like a dispersive filter. But you need a *huge* length of 
it - miles - before the effect can become audible. And with those kinds of 
lengths all kinds of other issues are more influential anyway.

You can check the claim audibly with a click test. Put in a click, and see 
what you hear. If it sounds like a chirp - which it won't - you know you 
have dispersive problems. But I'll bet anything that the most distorted 
sound you'll ever hear, even from a cheap system, is a slightly smoother 
click that lacks transient attack. And you can solve that by beefing up the 
amp to make sure it has enough drive to reproduce a click accurately, and 
using good monitors.

In fact in terms of distortion, the way that speakers mangle the sound is 
far more influential than cable.

Richard