av_phile said:
Is this good or bad? Care to share your hypothesis? If the skin effect is reduced, does that mean the cable's conductivity is better? Don't those expensive branded cables with their exotic geometries hype reduced skin effects?
Humans discern the direction of a sound source by level, and by timing. If two sources are center stage,ten feet away, and a foot apart sideways, a human will basically only be able to tell which is right or left of the other by the difference in arrival time between the ears, as the levels will be the same.
That timing difference will be in the 20 microsecond domain..lab testing finds that some can hear down in the 2 to 5 uSec range. Needless to say, those type of numbers are well beyond the human range max of 20Khz, but nobody really has paid much attention to signal integrity in the half Mhz area, why should we??? That timing difference, when produced on two speakers, is the true definition of soundstage...the ability of the system to fool you into thinking a source is where there is none.
Skin effect is actually very simple...all round wires have 15 nH/ft worth of inductance, simply due to the magnetic storage inside the conductor. Skin effect is the way the wire excludes the current (and resultant energy storage) from the inside of the wire...
With that inductance out of the way, transients can get to the speakers faster..if you worry only about 20Khz information, the trivial 15 nH per foot number doesn't mean anything...it's too small to worry about. But if you worry about the 2 to 5 uSec transients getting to the speaker, that 15 nH is not trivial anymore..
I don't yet know how to relate 2 uSec timing constraints to a stereo signal in a 20Khz BW system..it's a new area for me..
It is a trivial matter to buy off the shelf wire and exceed any and all the specifications being touted by those high end cable people..in time, a lot of the DIY stuff will start going that way, instead of some complex, marginal cross-coax or braided cat 5 stuff, simple off the shelf solutions will be far better..Of course, a far better high bandwidth cable may show off one's system's faults...a consequence of constantly using cables as "tone controls"..and another consequence of high bandwidth will be the inevitable capacitance increase, which some amps may not like.
I believe some of the vendors may be onto something with their cable stuff, but the actual explanations they give are usually a bunch of BS they picked up at some guru's website..totally lacking in any science or engineering, but couched in lots of doublespeak and garbage theories..
Cheers, John
