What is the difference between acoustic wires and ordinary wires

Installing high-qual­i­ty, almost pro­fes­sion­al acoustics with sur­round and detailed sound at home is not a task for those who are used to count­ing every pen­ny. Lit­er­al­ly every com­po­nent of such a sys­tem costs a lot. You will have to fork out when buy­ing a play­er (and def­i­nite­ly some kind of ana­log one, because the “dig­it” cuts the fre­quen­cy when transcod­ing, and does not allow the sound to open at all), and when pur­chas­ing speak­ers direct­ly, and even when choos­ing wires.

Indeed, acoustic wires cost some absolute­ly incred­i­ble mon­ey com­pared to ordi­nary ones. If a meter of a stan­dard cable will cost sev­er­al tens of rubles, then for spe­cial ones — for exam­ple, from REL Acoustic Ltd. will have to pay sev­er­al thou­sand. And this is at best. For exam­ple, a 6‑meter cable for con­nect­ing a REL Bassline Blue sub­woofer costs 499 euros, exclud­ing ship­ping.

And, accord­ing­ly, the ques­tion aris­es — is there any point in over­pay­ing? Maybe the acoustic wires real­ly help the sound to open up, and when lis­ten­ing, you can feel a real “audio­phile orgasm”? In this arti­cle we will try to answer it. Let’s fig­ure out how acoustic wires dif­fer from ordi­nary ones.

A bit of theory: how sound works

The task of the sound repro­duc­ing device is the con­ver­sion of sig­nals. This can be either a “con­ver­sion” of ana­log infor­ma­tion to dig­i­tal, or vice ver­sa. Or the con­ver­sion of a mechan­i­cal wave into an elec­tric cur­rent, as hap­pens when play­ing from vinyl media.

The audio sys­tem in approx­i­mate form con­sists of four func­tion­al units:

1. 
   Play­back object plus pick­up. It can be a dig­i­tal stream when down­load­ing music from the Inter­net, a vinyl record with record­ed tracks, a plas­tic CD with the same tracks, only with a high­er res­o­lu­tion, an audio cas­sette with mag­ne­tized sec­tions, and so on;

2. 
   Con­vert­er for con­vert­ing one type of ener­gy into anoth­er. It con­verts the dig­i­tal sig­nal into an elec­tri­cal cur­rent sup­plied to the speak­ers; it turns the vibra­tions of the nee­dle of the vinyl play­er into an elec­tric cur­rent going to the speak­ers … The oppo­site sit­u­a­tions also occur — when you need to turn the elec­tric cur­rent into some­thing else. For exam­ple, when record­ing from a micro­phone;

3. 
   Ampli­fi­er. The cur­rent that comes from the con­vert­er is extreme­ly small. In fact, its strength is mea­sured in microamps. He will not be able to “rock” the speak­ers at 35 watts. The ampli­fi­er is designed to increase the strength of the cur­rent;

4. 
   Speak­ers. They already receive a sig­nal of increased pow­er. It caus­es vibra­tions of a mag­net attached to the eardrum. And she, in turn, vibrates and push­es the air, giv­ing rise to sound.

Each of these func­tion­al ele­ments of the music play­back sys­tem is con­nect­ed to the oth­er by wires. And if you can basi­cal­ly ignore the cables between the pick­up, trans­duc­er and ampli­fi­er — they are too short — then long wires to the speak­ers are already becom­ing an object of close inter­est.

As is known from the school physics course, the longer the length of the con­duc­tor, the high­er its imped­ance. Because of this phe­nom­e­non, part of the sig­nal sim­ply “does not reach” the receiv­er, being lost in the thick­ness of the cable. For exam­ple, Eth­er­net wires used in lay­ing local area net­works can be up to 90 meters long with­out ampli­fi­ca­tion. And HDMI cables begin to lose sig­nal after 20–30 meters.

When installing a speak­er sys­tem, you have to use long wires. Not only can the speak­er itself be locat­ed at a con­sid­er­able dis­tance from the ampli­fi­er, but also the cables must be laid so that it does not inter­fere under­foot. And, as a result, the length of the con­duc­tor is con­stant­ly increas­ing.

Ordi­nary wires, in prin­ci­ple, have a rel­a­tive­ly high resis­tance. In thin options, it even reach­es sev­er­al ohms per meter. As a con­se­quence, part of the sig­nal is lost in any case when cur­rent is trans­mit­ted. Espe­cial­ly if sev­er­al waves of dif­fer­ent fre­quen­cies are sent simul­ta­ne­ous­ly along the cable.

To solve this prob­lem, it is cus­tom­ary to use acoustic wires. They con­sist most often of oxy­gen-free cop­per and are com­ple­ment­ed by gold-plat­ed tips. All this is designed to reduce the resis­tance of the wire, there­by ensur­ing high-pre­ci­sion sig­nal trans­mis­sion over long dis­tances.

How­ev­er, the ide­al­ized pic­ture of the world, in which only the cable affects the sound qual­i­ty, tends to crum­ble some­what against real­i­ty. After all, it is worth con­sid­er­ing two more fac­tors:

1. All ele­ments of the audio sys­tem must be of high qual­i­ty, clas­si­fied as Hi-Fi or Hi-End. If you have a class D ampli­fi­er like Pio­neer A 70 DA and acoustics like Tan­noy Rev­o­lu­tion XT 8F, then they can be con­nect­ed even with wires found in grand­fa­ther’s garage. The sound will still be impres­sive. And even the best speak­er wires will not be able to “pull out” audio from a sound card inte­grat­ed into a lap­top with Dexp speak­ers con­nect­ed;

2. The old­er we get, the worse we hear. Research­es of sci­en­tists con­firm that already after 20 years a per­son can­not dis­tin­guish between ultra-high and ultra-low fre­quen­cies.

Thus, it is advis­able to buy speak­er wires when installing Hi-End equip­ment.

Characteristics of a conventional wire

Ordi­nary wires are, as a rule, sol­id or strand­ed cop­per con­duc­tors in an insu­lat­ing sheath. Basi­cal­ly, that’s it. Char­ac­ter­is­tics of con­ven­tion­al wires depend on the cop­per alloy, sec­tion and length.

The high­er the cross sec­tion of the cable, the low­er the resis­tance. That is why in acoustics, options with a diam­e­ter of at least 1 mm are most often used, and 2.5 mm are most wide­ly used. This allows for very low trans­mis­sion loss­es.

At the same time, such wires are most often designed to trans­mit a low-fre­quen­cy sig­nal — about 60 Hz, as in a mod­ern house­hold elec­tri­cal net­work. That is why, when used with Hi-End equip­ment, they show sig­nif­i­cant loss­es. The fact is that mod­ern top-end ampli­fiers and con­vert­ers are capa­ble of “pro­duc­ing” a much high­er fre­quen­cy sig­nal.

Characteristics of the speaker wire

As well as ordi­nary acoustic wires, as a rule, they are mul­ti-core cop­per cables in an elec­tri­cal­ly insu­lat­ing sheath made of polyvinyl chlo­ride, poly­eth­yl­ene or teflon. How­ev­er, the dif­fer­ences lie “inside”. Thus, pure oxy­gen-free cop­per is often used for acoustic wires, rather than a cop­per alloy designed to trans­mit high-fre­quen­cy sig­nals with a low resis­tance of the con­duc­tor itself.

In addi­tion, oth­er solu­tions may be found in acoustic wires. to pro­tect the sig­nal from dis­tor­tion:

1. Com­bi­na­tion of met­als. Cop­per con­duc­tor can be coat­ed with sil­ver, alu­minum with cop­per. This is intend­ed to pro­tect against the so-called skin effect, which fur­ther increas­es resis­tance;

2. Shield­ing. Dielec­tric insu­la­tion is cov­ered with an addi­tion­al met­al braid, which pro­tects the elec­tric cur­rent from the effects of exter­nal elec­tro­mag­net­ic (induc­tion) fields, there­by pre­vent­ing the appear­ance of pick­ups;

3. High thick­ness. The stan­dard diam­e­ter of speak­er cables is 2.5–4 mm, and even more in top mod­els. As usu­al, this helps to reduce the resis­tance of the con­duc­tor;

4. Spe­cial mech­a­nisms for twist­ing con­duc­tor cores. This is aimed at pre­vent­ing the appear­ance of its own induc­tion field and pro­tec­tion against hom­ing.

As a rule, the pos­i­tive effect of these solu­tions is man­i­fest­ed when using a wire with ampli­fiers and speak­ers belong­ing to the Hi-End group. Except per­haps for shield­ing. Pro­tec­tion against elec­tro­mag­net­ic fields is nec­es­sary if the cable runs near a source of sig­nif­i­cant induc­tance (elec­tric motors, trans­form­ers, cur­rent con­vert­ers in pow­er sup­plies). There­fore, for exam­ple, wires used in car audio sys­tems are addi­tion­al­ly shield­ed.

Comparison of acoustic wire and conventional

So, it’s time to com­pare these two types of cables. Groups are con­sid­ered, not prod­ucts, so only key dif­fer­ences are high­light­ed.

Speak­er cables are designed for use with Hi-End equip­ment. Then and only then will it be pos­si­ble to hear exact­ly how they affect the sound.