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

[Richard Wentk]

At 16:47 11/07/2005, Magnus Danielson wrote:
>Exactly. Passive filters? Whoooo, do I need to say more???? Toss your big amp
>aside, the passive filter is burning your power away and your control of the
>elements is not being changed greatly by the amp.

Up to a point. A lot of amps don't have the drive need to handle a 
filter/speaker combination without splattering the sound, so something 
beefy will be more likely to do a good job of it than something cheap.

But it's interesting that there are so few active designs around, with - 
say - the speaker/filter in a feedback loop to try to minimise distortions.

I think Philips tried this at the consumer end, but it wasn't a success. 
Potentially some kind of accurate feedback could go a long way to 
cancelling out non-linearities. But it would be a pig of a thing to design 
and implement, and probably insanely expensive as an R&D project.

So-called active speakers don't usually do anything like this. They just 
eliminate the speaker cable by putting the amp and speaker next to each 
other, and (usually) making sure the amp section is two independent 
monoblocs, which always helps anyway.

Richard