all right my name is Dave Rat and this is the second part of a three part
series of videos I'm doing where we're actually listening to the loss of sound
in speaker cables in part 1 if you haven't watched that yet I described the
setup and its entirety how its wired and go into some detail on that basically
what we're doing is hooking a speaker and an analyzer across one of the wires
of the test speaker cable such that the speaker is outputting this out the
difference in sound between what is sent into the cable and what's coming out so
let's see the difference between the two ends you'll also hear the end of the
cable - I'll do some comparisons in this video I'll be demonstrating the
difference between a 100 foot 12 gauge pro audio cable versus a 50 foot 16
gauge install grade cable so you have a thinner shorter cable versus a longer
thicker wire and we can listen to the tonal differences at the loss between
those two additionally we will do coiled versus uncoiled where I'll leave them
spool up and uncoil them and you can actually hear the difference in sound
caused by coiling a cable or leaving it coiled or the different types of cables
then I'll go on to do a 50 foot 12 gauge cable pro audio cable versus a THHN
electrical grade stranded cable that you would wire a house with or use in
electrical boxes and that's coiled up really tightly coiled so you can really
hear an extreme version of what a coiled cable sounds like and finally I'll do
those two coiled cables verses a twisted pair of THHN the exact same wire but
twisted into a pair and I'll coil that up into a coil and uncoil it and yeah
maybe find these results interesting and I hope you enjoy and part three will
come soon
all right so for our next phase of testing what I'm going to
do is take off this 12-gauge 25 foot cable and leave the 100 foot 12 gauge
cable there and we're going to bring in this 16 gauge 50 foot cable so this is a
shorter cable it's half the length and it's a thinner gauge and let's listen to
the difference between the two first we'll start with a coiled 100 foot cable
first we will start with our coiled 100 foot cable
as you can see there is a 6.3K peak rolling off
quite a bit down at 20k
and I'll switch to 16 gauge
and I wont switch to the 16 gauge
that's what happens if I hook it up wrong because I had this banana plug reversed
so let's try that again the 16 gauge
12 gauge
16 gauge
and 16-gauge sounds a little brighter the more clarity on the top end
they're relatively the same in volume even though this one is twice the length
the thicker wire gauge has made up for
the thicker wire gauge has made up for thinner wire gauge shorter length, the frequency response is different though
so let's go ahead and uncoil this 16 gauge
and compare a more real world situation
lets do it while we are listening to it
so here is a 16 gauge uncoiled we can see its fairly flat with a slight boost in the high end remember this is the
loss which means it's losing some high end and we are only looking at what is
being dissipated by the cable and we go through the coiled 100 foot
and we can see that the uncoil 16 is flatter and sounds better and the coiled
100 foot lets go ahead and uncoil the 100 foot because we dont like the way the 100 foot sounds
and sorry about banging that mic there
lets put this over here
with the cable messes here it will give me some practice winding stuff up a little bit later
and now we have an uncoiled 100 foot and an uncoiled 50 foot 16 gauge comparison
that's interesting because we can hear that's the 100 foot
50 foot 16 gauge
12 gauge 100 foot
the 12 gauge 100 foot is clearly brighter
than the 16 gauge which is duller
which means that the 16-gauge had less high frequency loss at
50 feet then the 12-gauge does at 100 feet
all right let's keep going I'll put that over there
turn that down and let's grab another cable
lets get into our 50 foots here
this is a 50 foot I'm gonna take out the 100 footer we're done with
that and we're gonna stick with 50 footers from here on out we will listen
and we will listen to the 50 foot 12-gauge
coiled again we see the inductive peak and its at a lower lever so we turn the
this is at a lower volume than 100 foot which is to be expected
now what I'm going to do is grab
let's go to worst case scenario this is AC wire that you would use to wire your house
THHN wire and it's a new coil I just basically cut this spools off and left
them faily coiled up coils up and plug this banana in
correctly this time and we'll listen to the coiled THHN 50-foot versus a pro
audio type cable coil with the pairs coiled together and as you can hear that
here there the THHN is extremely loud and that's for the same reason these are
forming extremely effective inductors in fact they're so effective that we can show
that too here's a 1/2 inch socket
and we'll be able to tell which one it is
and all I'm doing is inserting an steel socket extension
into the coil forming an iron core which improves the inductance of
increases the inductance which makes it roll off even more
and we see that we have a lot of high frequency roll off when we do that do that
this one doesn't do anything I'm not measuring that
but when I go to that other coil here
all right so that is a good demonstration of the extremes of coiled
wire THHN and vs pro audio cable so you may be
asking yourself well THHN vs. pro audio cable maybe it's the sound of the THHN
and the coiled let's go ahead and check that out what I'm gonna do now just get
rid of this 50-foot pro audio cable this is actually an NL2 cable which is why if you notice
it's a little thinner than the NL4 cable that I was using before let's go
ahead and grab what I did here I took a THHN cable
I un spooled it got a drill out and spun it
into a twisted pair
and we are going to go ahead and listen to that
this in this will be this is exactly the same type of cable we've got a green and a black THHN and two
white's the color shouldn't make much difference but let's go ahead and listen
to the coiled cable versus the twisted cable that's coiled into a loop ish
Now that's really quiet probably because it is not attached
there, sorry about that
there we go so there is the twisted THHN
and the coiled THHN
so twisting the pairs is extremely important for maintaining high frequency response and making it
more impervious to being coiled now we can take this
and unspool it
on to the floor into my cable mess and see that it doesn't make too much
and back to the coiled
all right