HomeyJay
Active Member
OK, I know this is going to stir up a hornets nest but Im sure its something most readers are wondering.
After spending a couple of weeks arguing about speaker cable (we are sad gits), me and two friends decided to see what difference quality speaker cable would make to an AV setup.
One of my friends has a Yamaha DSP630 amp and KEF Eggs & sub as his audio setup at home. Despite my continual whinging at him about getting good cable, to connect it all together he bought 79p/metre cable (70 strand). I have to say that his setup sounds really impressive but I always annoyed him by telling him that setup would sound far better with proper cable.
Another friend of ours had a large quantity of £5/metre cable (a very well known make) left over after his installation so we connected up the rears on my friends setup with this stuff. The rears were not connected up as rears - they were connected up as a second set of fronts using the Yamahas second set of speaker connections so that we could switch each set of speakers in and out to listen to them. BTW all the cable was equal length.
Both my friends are BBC Sound Engineers and I am a keen recording musician with years of experience in studios and behind mixing desks. My friends wheeled in a Lexicon spectrum analyser ( borrowed from work ) and a Neumann U87 microphone which I own. The mic was placed on a stand in the centre of the room, equidistant between the speaker sets.
We started off by playing various frequencies from a sound test DVD and analysing the speaker output from each set at each frequency. We then went on to individual passages of music and did the same. Then we turned the analyser off and just listened to various CDs and DVDs through each set of speakers, constantly switching between them. Halfway through the test, we switched speakers just in case there was a difference in response between each set.
What did we find ?
There we sooo little difference between the cables that we were barely able to tell the difference. Sometimes there was no difference at all. I wanted desperately for there to be a difference but ultimately I admitted that I really couldnt hear a difference most of the time. The result stunned us all - its not what we expected.
Just for a final laugh, we replaced the 99p cable with mains cable - single 1.5mm copper core. There was now a difference but nowhere near as much as you would expect !
What on earth is going on ? Is this the Emperors new clothes all over again ?
After spending a couple of weeks arguing about speaker cable (we are sad gits), me and two friends decided to see what difference quality speaker cable would make to an AV setup.
One of my friends has a Yamaha DSP630 amp and KEF Eggs & sub as his audio setup at home. Despite my continual whinging at him about getting good cable, to connect it all together he bought 79p/metre cable (70 strand). I have to say that his setup sounds really impressive but I always annoyed him by telling him that setup would sound far better with proper cable.
Another friend of ours had a large quantity of £5/metre cable (a very well known make) left over after his installation so we connected up the rears on my friends setup with this stuff. The rears were not connected up as rears - they were connected up as a second set of fronts using the Yamahas second set of speaker connections so that we could switch each set of speakers in and out to listen to them. BTW all the cable was equal length.
Both my friends are BBC Sound Engineers and I am a keen recording musician with years of experience in studios and behind mixing desks. My friends wheeled in a Lexicon spectrum analyser ( borrowed from work ) and a Neumann U87 microphone which I own. The mic was placed on a stand in the centre of the room, equidistant between the speaker sets.
We started off by playing various frequencies from a sound test DVD and analysing the speaker output from each set at each frequency. We then went on to individual passages of music and did the same. Then we turned the analyser off and just listened to various CDs and DVDs through each set of speakers, constantly switching between them. Halfway through the test, we switched speakers just in case there was a difference in response between each set.
What did we find ?
There we sooo little difference between the cables that we were barely able to tell the difference. Sometimes there was no difference at all. I wanted desperately for there to be a difference but ultimately I admitted that I really couldnt hear a difference most of the time. The result stunned us all - its not what we expected.
Just for a final laugh, we replaced the 99p cable with mains cable - single 1.5mm copper core. There was now a difference but nowhere near as much as you would expect !
What on earth is going on ? Is this the Emperors new clothes all over again ?