Anything beat dh labs t-14 for the money......


any other cables that can compete with this for the cash...Im not a cable freak...but am willing to drop $200 or so just see if there is a larger, justified investment down the road...or if I can already distinquish differences between hi end speakers/ electronics with my current 14awg copper cable...do I really need to upgrade?
128x128phasecorrect

Showing 6 responses by marakanetz

Sean,
I thought always that speaker is inductive load...
The inductive roll-off of offered speaker wire is within mid-tens of micro-ohms for ten meters.
Sean I realy love to see everything in numbers.

Let's take 20m of Alpha-core the high-capacitance wire or interconnect. Let's assume that such high-capacitance wire has 50pf/m(I think it's large enough) that will overall give a capacitance of 800pf and voice coil inductance of 0.3...0.7mH and determine a self-oscilation freequency of such load wich equals 1/sqare root of product of both.
Without precise calculation I'll state that in the denominator the number has a degree of -7.5 that states that self-oscilation may occur at tens of megahertz. These freequencies, if not filtered properly, may result a parasite oscilations of the amplifier that will act certainly negatively on normal amp performance. These freeququencies have also a large enough amplitudes so that it's lower freequency harmonics may also be amplified. The solution states in blocking such freequencies and limiting sencitivity for lower freequency harmonics to make the amplification or preamplification stable. If the amplifier was made tube or SS with carefull consideration of RF compatibility rules, wires are only to be considered as resistive load and should realy cost minimum. The best ones are only under zero-Kelvin temperature where super-conductivity effect was discovered.
You can also plug-in another reasonable values of capacitive and inductive reactance of speaker or speaker wire and all you realy need to know is simple radio equation where you equate both of the reactances to determin the self-oscilation freequency.
Every time you divide or multiply this derived freequency by 2 you get even-order harmonics and it means that you multiply the product of reactances to get a freequency divider. To get freequency multiplier you decrease reactances etc...etc...etc... Any harminics of self-oscilating freequency have smaller amplitude so by selecting a values of feedback resistor and capacitor you can always prevent amp's self-oscilations.
Please note that in tube amps output tube less-likely to oscillate by itself but small-signal ones realy do while in transistor amps both input and output transistors may oscillate at RF.
Oh, yeah! forgot to say that everything I say is towards nonsence of hassling with wires of any kind at audio freequencies. If the equipment poised to pick them up than no fancy snake-coated wires would help ever.

Old fassioned way sais "generic Monster Cable" is enough and sufficient and should only be considered as heavy duty, neccessary gauge and properly and tightly connected.
Sean,
I agree for my too optimistic values selected. they could go to 500kHz(yet forgot to factor by 6.28) especially in Alpha-core case managed to bring up unbeleavable huge p/u capacitance. The "generic Monster" or "generic RadioShack" has both capacitance and inductance much much lower than Kimber or AlphaCore.
Is it normal to oscilate at 200kHz? at what amplitude? If the design is "wide open" with no correction and with "zero feedback" than probably it will from even tens of microvolts.
Sean, I like this good mentioning of "Power Bandwidth" is realy missing parameter that DOES specify how good this amp should sound to make everyone clear that specifications means something at least.
How about amps that have badwidth(and certainly amplitude) limitations truely according to a-must to follow RF compatibility rules and with no compromise to the hobbyist-built components? It realy just a matter of time fine-tuning input, driving and output stages to the perfection and carefully and thoroghly selecting values for correction to prevent any kind of self-oscillation. There are too many tips on amp-building and tuning but the bottom line is that self-oscillation on 200kHz or in the range is NOT acceptible on any component.
Certainly if OpAmp chips are used in input and driving stages the self-oscillation problem is already solved but sound is what will suffer. Tuning transistors or tubes is much more complicated and time consuming issue and time consumption is not good for business.