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Speaker Cable a Must!

#87
edro said:
Somehow AC became directional too so cables also became directional. I must have missed that announcement...

I guess plugging the cable in backwards might create a black hole....
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That's simply ridiculous. Obviously it will only put your signal out of phase with the rest of the band, sucking out all their lows and probably about 78% of the mojo. For a black hole to form, you must have a backwards cable, pickups wire out of phase, your ground switch in the wrong location, and the house AC ground attached to a drain pipe. Everybody knows that.
 
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#89
agedhorse said:
There are 18 gauge cables that are just as robust, but assuming the connectors can handle the added weight and stiffness of 12 gauge cable, the 12 gauge cable MAY be a little more mechanically robust. It may also cause problems if the connectors can not handle the cable (including the barrel on a 1/4" plug).
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Oh, absolutely, I agree with you there. Physics says heavier things have more inertia and common sense suggests that having more material can survive a catastrophic event, but if both 12 ga and 18 ga cables would work equally well for a certain use from an electrical perspective, carrying extra weight isn't really making that cable more roadworthy in my eyes. If a cymbal is dropped on its side onto a speaker cable, sure, maybe it slices 18ga a little deeper than a 12ga cable. If a piano drops on a 12ga cable, maybe the thicker cable flattens a little bit less proportionally than would an 18ga cable. But clearly, I would repair/ditch either cable if something like that were to happen because, in either case, the integrity of the cable is clearly compromised, so to me, it's a non-factor that one might be slightly less compromised than the other. I'm clearly not going to use a compromised cable. We're not talking about 28ga pickup lead wire here, a 18ga professional grade speaker wire can be plenty legit.

To me, part of roadworthiness, too, is that cable bags fill up and get very heavy very quickly. If you have a weight or volume limit in your luggage and carrying 18ga speaker cables is allowing you to carry more spare cables than carrying 12ga speaker cables without increasing transportation costs, then to me, the 18ga cable has a clear advantage, if anything.
 
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#90
Weight can be a big issue. Between power mic and speaker cabling, I routinely carried almost a thousand pounds of cable with the A rig on the road.
 
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#92
I wonder if stiffness contributes to the connector failures along with the weight. If it's stiffer, it will stick out further, and offer more leverage. Not to mention when bumped or tugged at.

2 x diameter will be 4 x weight if I am not mistaken. Of course that would be the copper... insulation/jacket is another factor.
 
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#93
BadExample said:
I wonder if stiffness contributes to the connector failures along with the weight. If it's stiffer, it will stick out further, and offer more leverage. Not to mention when bumped or tugged at.

2 x diameter will be 4 x weight if I am not mistaken. Of course that would be the copper... insulation/jacket is another factor.
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Correct, this is my experience
 
#94
agedhorse said:
Weight can be a big issue. Between power mic and speaker cabling, I routinely carried almost a thousand pounds of cable with the A rig on the road.
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You haven't lived until you have done lighting in a venue with distant power, and had to road a 600 foot, 5 wire set of 4/0 . . . . I'd have giggled like a schoolgirl to have had only 1000lbs, and this was just the feeder, no Soca . . . A quick calc had just the feeder at 3000 lbs or so, no connnectors, no cases . . . . The trick is to find the guy that pisses you off most, and let him hump the feeder . . . . :-) :-)
 
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#95
Oh I have had my own relationships with 2/0 and 4/0, none were what I would characterize as lasting relationships... more like one night stands.

I'm on the road this weekend babysitting 7 outdoor systems including 1 arena system. Trying to stay awake after a nice lunch ;)
 
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#96
Our PA for our jazz group is rather small, a 200-watt Yamaha. We found ourselves short a speaker cable a few weeks ago and in order to have monitors I thought I was going to have to take my chances with an instrument cable. I couldn't remember the reason for not using an instrument cable, so I Googled it, and what I found told me that it's because the shielding is liable to fail when carrying high power. I was SOL anyway, so I decided to chance it, figuring it's only a 200-watt system and wouldn't be turned up more than halfway anyway. (Then someone showed up with another speaker cable, so I didn't have to use the instrument cable.)

But what say you People Who, Like, Really Know Things, is it the shielding that is the weak point when running power to speakers through an instrument cable?
 
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#98
farace said:
I couldn't remember the reason for not using an instrument cable, so I Googled it, and what I found told me that it's because the shielding is liable to fail when carrying high power.
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Yes, but the center conductor and the insulation are also vulnerable. Which of them is most so depends on the cable's construction. For all intents and purposes, an instrument cable is a NO power cable. It may survive being used in a low power application (single-digit watts) but it's the wrong cable even for that use. The shield may fail or the center conductor may fail or the insulation may fail (more common that you think). Crappy sound, if you get only that, is a failure, too. Failure is just shy of being certain.

For the purpose of this reply resistance and impedance are alike. Every conductor ("wire") has resistance. Longer wire has more resistance than shorter wire; smaller diameter wire has more resistance than bigger diameter wire. When current passes through a wire, the resistance converts electrical energy to heat. Always. No exceptions outside laboratories. In normal use the heat is insignificant and is carried off by air moving around the conductor. When you push high current through undersized wire the wire heats up and the heat doesn't dissipate as fast as it's being created. Double whammy: as wire heats up its resistance increases making more heat. Repeat until failure. That's what happens when you connect an amp's speaker output to a cab with an instrument cable which always uses small conductors. The sequence of failure may vary and the failure mode may vary but the fact of failure will not.

Here's a side question apropos of another common topic that's much misunderstood. As the wire heats and resistance goes up, what's your 4-ohm or 8-ohm impedance match doing?
 
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