Speaker cable lengths.

[whiskywheels]

As some of you may have seen from my previous post, I've recently returned to the realm of Hi-Fi neurosis!

My speaker cables are unequal lengths; one's about 3m, the other about 8m. Although the system sounds fine, I seem to remeber reading something about how this could damage the amplifier? Is this true, and does it really matter?

 

[Anonymous]

Naim amplifiers [maybe not recent models?] can be damaged if the speaker cable is too short or lacks the right electrical characteristics. I don't know of similar requirements applying to other brands but that doesn't mean there aren't any.

Beyond that, I can't think how using unequal lengths could damage an amplifier. All they are doing is presenting the two channels of the amp with slightly different loads. In general, I should think, the shorter the better.

 

[whiskywheels]

Thanks Tetrist. There's certainly nothing in my amp documentation mentioning equal cable lengths, so hopefully nothing to worry about, and I should stop reading too many Hi-Fi articles!

 

[floyd droid]

Oh joy another cable thread.

Sits back and waits

 

[Anonymous]

I had once been told that one should keep the length of the cables equal, for if one cable was much longer than the other that could result in some unpleasant time lag. However I have just read that although electrons do not move at the speed of light, electricity does. So it looks like it's impossible to hear any difference: a 5m distance would amount to a lag of 5/299,792,458 < 2.10^-8 second. That is, the lag would be less than 2 hundredth of millionth of a second.

I don't know if there could be any other consequence...

 

[wireman]

With early naim and exposure amplifiers (which under the skin were virtually identical), it was to do with the inductance of the cable (do a wiki on that), hence both naim and exposure had their own brands of speaker cable and equal lengths were recommended.