Alright I'm Dave Rat and this is the third video in a series where i'm doing
listening tests on the losses and effects of various types of speaker
cable upon the sound that arrives at the speaker i've done two other videos
before this comparing various lengths and gauges of regular audio cables as
well as some THHN type cable that would be used for wiring your house and
stranded I've compared that to solid core we've left it tightly wound and put
a metal wrench inside of it a socket wrench extension inside and showed the
inductive effects and compared solid core to stranded to speaker cable and
also various gauges as well today I'm gonna talk about well I'm gonna show you
we have some Romex here which is more solid conductor wire for a
house we've got some maybe I didn't do a solid yet maybe this will be the first
solid so we'll get that, some 16 gauge, here's a 50 foot piece of romex 12 gauge here's a 50 foot
piece and 16 gauge install grade wire which has twist in it but the twists are
very slow this here is some THHN wire that i twisted in the garage it's got a
much more rapid twist I've got some flat wire which is an extreme this would
typically be laid out flat so it wouldn't have the coiling effect but
we're gonna have that inductance we'll listen to what the inductance sounds
like and uncoil that and then also i've got some
here I've also got some fairly high grade home wire it's not super
expensive but it is multiple lines of of braided I believe it
16-gauge times 8 per each of the conductors so
there's 8 black wires and 8 blue wires braided together here to do like a
Litz wire and I'm going to compare that to a short piece of 16 gauge
install grade wire I don't know what this calculates out - as far as actual
wire gauge but I think it came up to around 8 somewhere around 8 gauge
between eight and nine gate nine gauge wire all right so let me throw some of
this stuff on the floor in various spots and let's get started all right so let's
start with a little demo of the test rig where we will right now we are listening
to and seeing
the sound of the pink noise passing through this twisted THHN wirer 50 foot 12
gauge and it's the speaker this home hi-fi speaker is hooked up directly to
the output so that will be the sound arriving at the speaker
and we see a fairly flat response there than the accuracy of this old gear that
I'm using now what I'm going to do is I'm going to move one of these probes
over so that we're listening to just the loss it's very quiet
turn that up and now we're just listening to one of these wires and the
difference between the beginning and the end of the thhn let's go ahead and hook
up some romex unwieldy stuff this romex
does not like to be coiled why do we and we can see the response of the loss
which tends towards a high frequency which means we're probably losing more
high frequency and/or there's some inductive effects of the wire how it's
pulled out on the floor causing the high frequencies not to be able to pass
through the wire but either way the speaker is not seeing the frequencies
here all right
and we'll go to the romex
and there's the romex can hear it louder
and then i'll unspool this to some degree and we should be able to see the
high-frequency drop down
and this is solid conductor the romex is versus the stranded conductor on the
THHN all right it's kind of unspool ditch and we'll go back and forth now
we're still hearing the romex I'll put that down and up for the thhn has got a duller
sound to it I wouldn't attribute that necessarily to the solid conductor as I
would to the fact that it's not twisted and it's probably seeing more inductance
from how it's laid out and also ya don't really have a good deduction on that
other than romex is a pain to work with it looks fairly usable 16 gauge 50 foot
install grade wire
that's the THHN and the 16-gauge whoa dad that's because I messed it up
here
and we're hearing a louder sound from the 16-gauge but it is coiled so let's
go ahead and uncoil it now we should hear a louder sound for more laws
because of the thinner gauge wire so there's gonna be more drop let's go
ahead and uncoil this
what have I done here
and I think we heard a little high-frequency differential there and we
can see that high-frequency differential drop you rewind the video so in the
THHN we're just seeing the high frequency loss but it's passing the lows
the install grade has got a fairly flat response actually kind of what we want
we would rather have a linear drop across the full bandwidth as far as
frequency response is concerned than having a nonlinear with a peak towards
the highs
alright so let's go ahead and listen to
some of this flat wire compared to the 16 gauge 50 foot and this flat wire is
designed to go like under carpet or behind a panel in the wall and be smooth
to the surface you can see here it's sticky and it's got these flat upper
foil leads and it's rated at 16 gauge so let's go ahead and listen to those to
compare this is the 16 gauge 50 foot install grade
and you can see the test slightly rising response there Wow
soil can be expected we've got a really good inductor here in fact I bet if I
put my thing in the middle of it
all right so let's go ahead and see what happens when we uncoil this
try not to get a paper cut
and it is spooled up in a bunch of helical's on the floor there but it
obviously seems to be working all right no time coiled let's compare back the
other way the flat wire is slightly louder I'm guessing that the that's
mainly due the gauge being slightly less than 16 all right I'll pause the video
so I can hook up this stuff here for this one what I'm gonna do is test a
high quality or fairly high quality not very expensive but a braided it's got
eight conductors of black wire and eight conductors of blue wire kind of a Litz
wire home - evil and we'll compare that to a short piece now of course we'll
start comparing that to a 50-foot piece of 16 gauge because I've got it hooked
up and we'll see with this 40-foot piece of approximately 8 gauge wire sounds
like so we'll try that coiled and uncoil it and see if the coiling effects it and
also listen to a more of a audiophile cable
and this is the audiophile cable
it'll be flat and then we're gonna 16-gauge and we can clearly hear that
there's a lot more loss in that 16-gauge then there is in the audiophile cable
we're seeing a slight peak in the audiophile cable but it is coiled up as
well so let's go ahead and uncoil that hopefully not unplugging it at the same
time
and that little peak there did go away that's compared now audiophile cables
looking pretty good let's go ahead and do the next
oh I'll leave this on coil let's get rid of the 16 gauge
and now what I'm gonna do is use a very short piece it's about five feet long of
16 gauge so the same thing it's the same wire that we just compared against but
it's a much shorter piece and we'll compare a long 40-foot long eight gauge
audiophile cable to a five-foot piece of 16 gauge and there's the 16 gauge
there's the audio file available I think this test is interesting because
if you buy a high-end piece of cable that's too long
I'm just getting a short little wire seems to perform better at least for
frequency response now I haven't done damping factor and transient response
tests and I've still got to come up with a simple way of showing that and
hopefully I will but in this situation a thinner shorter wire is performing
better than a longer high-end wire and
yeah I think I'm gonna do some more testing as well I did another video
comparing the loss or the yeah the losses in cat5e with analog running
through it versus using snake cable standard audio snake cable and listening
to the differences between those upcoming videos I've been having I've
been getting questions on mic cable coil versus uncoiled snake cable coils versus
on coiling cat 5e coiled versus uncoiled so those are all tests that I can do and
I hope to be sharing soon all right I hope that you enjoy this and find it
interesting and let me know anything that any comments any flaws to what I'm
doing or suggestions on future videos to do and
I'm happy to share it and happy with the response that I've been getting this is
really great to talk to the audio community and nerd up on some sound
stuff