This article is about speaker cables. It is not about interconnect component cables that are quite different in the demands placed on them. I don´t make components, so I have not thought about those cables much, I might one day.
At some point in designing our SoundSommeliers sound systems we came to the point of selecting a speaker cable to go with it. We genuinely wanted to put sound first, at the same times we wanted to keep our systems at a cost where they can be accessible to many. Venturing into the topic I was prepared for a painful tradeoff of cost over quality.
My mildly scandalous revelation was: There is no trade off. At least not to any serious degree. As long as a speaker cable is thick enough for the material chosen, it´ll sound great. Standard lamp cord sounds great (unless the lamp shines to weak for the room). Gizmodo has shown in double blind testing that coat hangers perform well next to audiophile grade monster cables.
Now we audiophiles are arguably a strange crowd in how we are scientifically minded on one hand and susceptible to pay a lot of money for the unmeasurable improvement on the other. We are also endearingly conservative when it comes to adopting change and if we were equally passionate about the telephone, perhaps, we would verbosely defend an argument like "yes, cell phones are convenient, but the conversations on a dial tone phone just somehow end up being more engaging".
Furthermore we are surprisingly undemanding on industry to prove any claims in the double blind testing environments carefully designed and placed at the heart of modern science to separate the snake oil salesmen from the genuine apothecaries.
On the topic of speaker cables a lot has been written and there are many people who dedicate their life to their making. I really want to be respectful here and respect anyone who is on a genuine quest of improvement as minuscule as it may be. But there are many ludicrous claims that are being made in the industry and I can only assume that those making them are consciously deceptive.
1. Resistance is futile. Yes speaker wires need to conduct electricity well. Copper does that. Silver does that better. Gold is relatively bad. A silver wire conducts as well as a copper wire that is only 3% thicker. The only thing better than copper is graphene and of graphene speaker wires are available at 12´000 Dollars each. Making things bigger is always a great way of reducing resistance rather than making them from graphene. Now copper oxidizes and so does silver, gold does not. Soldering is therefore a good idea as is gold plating any contacts. I am pretty sure a supercooled superconducting speaker cable is just around the corner. Low oxygen copper, by the way provides a marginal reduction in resistance that could easily be compensated by size. Low oxygen copper is readily available, however, doesn't cost much and can't hurt. We sell our sound systems with low oxygen copper, but would probably choose not to if that meant selling them at a higher price as the advantages would not be audible.
2. You need a thick skin... Sometimes people selling cables make a claim that their design is superior because of its ability to deal with something called the skin effect. This effect has it that in any conductor carrying an alternating current, this current really only travels through a surface layer of the conductor, but not through the core. The argument is that this will lead to deterioration of the sound signal. The skin effect does in fact exist, the thickness of the skin can be calculate for a given frequency by knowing things like magnetic permeability of the material and its resistivity. At 22kHz audio frequencies in copper, the skin is about 40cm and with that 16 times thicker than the skin of most pachyderms. Skin effect does play a role in Hi-Frequency Radio Signals that transmit in Megahertz not kHz. If you are really concerned about the skin effect, get a speaker wire that consists of many small strands (lamp cord). They also bend nicer.
3. Capacitance: We usually think of electricity as electrons traveling as if they were water in a pipe. Similar to what happens in "Newton´s Cradle " shown to the right, electricity is conducted in metals by one electron transferring the energy to the neighboring electron without moving much on their own. For this to work, the electrons actually do not need to touch but can be put in close contact with each other and transmit their energy across a narrow gap. This is called capacitance. The concern with speaker wires is that they run so close to each other that the electron´s transmit their energy across the insulator. The resulting dielectric loss is accused of depriving the loudspeaker of all ability to enchant much. Now if this truly were a problem, the easy fix would be to separate both wires by an sufficient and small amount by increasing the insulator thickness thus adding very little to its actual cost. Capacitance is measured in Farads (F) and capacitance of normal lamp cord is about 10-20 pF per meter length. Normal lamp cord the length of a typical speaker wire will lose about 0.2% of its energy in the audible spectrum. So little is capacity a problem that most producers of premium speaker wires deliberately increase capacitance in the hope to address our next problem child: Inductance.
3. Inductance: Many of us audiophiles have one thing in common with our cables: Our inherent resistance to change. Alternating currents in conductors "induce" an opposing voltage on both the conductor they are traveling on and any neighboring conductors. With an audio signal the current changes a lot. This sounds like a real problem and without being dramatic this actually is the weak link of using basic lamp cord. In the audible spectrum a 5 ft cable made from lamp cord will have 1% inductance loss. I will let you decide if a 1% loss to inductance is a problem. Keeping the cables short is certainly never a bad idea. Inductance can easily be reduced by using twisted pair cables or other household fixes. Those fixes always increase capacitance and many premium cables actually look like they were designed to be excellent capacitors as shown above.
4. Directionality: This one puzzles me in its audacity. There are claims that in a cable, the electrons prefer to flow in one direction over another. These cables are then marked with an amplifier side and a speaker side in an attempt to comply with the electrons unexplained natural preference. Of course in reality audio signals carry alternating current and all electrons flow back and forth staying in the same place on average. Electrons simply don't have the luxury to head south for the winter no matter what they might prefer for themselves. If a speaker cable manufacturer makes that claim I would suggest looking elsewhere.
5. Speaker cables are not the weakest link. The one thing that many forget is that the signal path doesn't start at the amplifiers outputs and end at the speakers binding posts. That´s where the real fun begins. The huge expensive cables are ultimately connected to tiny wires that are wound hundreds of times making up many feet to form the voice coil, the coils in the cross overs, or the filters in the amplifiers. The speaker cable most probably won't be your weakest link when comes to conducing electricity. There are smaller fish to fry.
With all that in mind, there is something to be said about the emotional experience of doing something exceptional and extravagant for ourselves in our quest of auditory perfection in our hobby. And just as the placebo effect has demonstrated that blue sugar pills are 30% more effective in curing headaches than pink sugar pills, if something feels better, it already is. So if there is something quirky, inexplicable and wonderful that we believe to make a difference let's not question it. Selling it for money under false pretenses is a different story.
We believe that great sound can be achieved without a lot of money, and what we are in it for is getting a generation raised on squeeze boxes and tiny bluetooth gimmicks back into a hobby that has kept our fathers riveted for many years.
