Which is better?

[Rare Bird]

I just use what ever length plonking my stereo where i want it, works out to..

[Marco]

No worries, Dave. I'm sure that's good advice for Rob. It won't do any harm to experiment though with some Belden or Van Damme cable, as it costs buttons.

Neither the 66s nor 15XRs, with the copper amp, seem to mind the 14m of cable either side it takes to connect the former to the latter when the former are downstairs in the lounge

I've never tried the Lockwoods with very long speaker cable lengths (as they've always lived in my listening room), so don't know how they'd react.

Marco.

[DSJR]

You devil you - bloomin' 66's.............

[Welder]

Hmm, I don’t imagine many people know what their amps can manage by way of impedance, let alone know the capacitance per metre of their speaker cable, including connections.
Some amps are quite happy with high capacitance speaker cables; some aren’t.
I’m with Marco on this, balanced interconnects, yep fine, go as long as you need, unbalanced keep em short 0.5m or less, particularly between Dac and Pre and pre and power.
Imo heavily screened interconnects fare better over longer runs, but if I was to have dual monos feeding speakers I would want balanced pre to power anyway.
Not much point in spending good money on cables if you then go and ruin it all by getting the lengths all wrong and mismatched impedances in the chain.
Just my opinion.

[DSJR]

This was probably why AVI amps tended to be sold as sets, pre and power. The pre (a late S2000MP+P) was designed to drive long runs in any case, so in this instance, maybe I was spoiled, but the Audiolab 8000Q was also designed to do this and probably sounded sweeter when doing so for all I remember.

I agree regarding balanced, but for normal minimal domestic use, I do argue against all that electronics (or iron-n-windings) added in... I remember the levinson ML28 preamp was fully balanced from input to output from memory, needing VERY closely matched components I remember. Nice preamp too and available for less than a grand still I think.

[Welder]

Course, just to complicate things there are balanced outputs and then properly balanced amps as I have found out

[hifi_dave]

The Levinson amps are/were properly and fully balanced with each channel split into positive and negative to drive each half of the signal waveform. This has benefits in the sound but is diffiicult and very expensive to accomplish properly as each of the amps has to perform identically to the others.

This is why the majority of balanced outputs/inputs are done by an IC or transformer and often sound worse than the single ended option.

As for driving long runs of incon, say over 4-5 mtrs, many pre-amps will not give of their best as the output driver stage is not up to the job. All you can do is suck it and see...

[Barry]

It is always best to position the power amp close to the speakers and use short speaker cables. This is because the loop resistance of the speaker cable appears in series with the output impedance of the amplifier, thus reducing the damping factor, or the ability of the amplifier to control the speaker (or if you like, to 'stop the tail wagging the dog').

The disadvantage of course is that then the connections between the pre- and power amplifier are long and the capacitance of the cable becomes an issue. For most modern amplifiers, especially solid-state, the output impedance of the pre- is very low whilst the input imput impedance is high so problems don't occur. Quad preamps, the 33 and 44, have a comparatively high source impedance of 1KOhm, but even then the maximum interconnect length is 30m (assuming a reasonable cable capacitance of 60pF/m). More modern preamps have source impedances of less than 100Ohm.

Obviously the best way to go is to use balanced lines between pre- and power amp, however only a few systems support this, though it is becoming more prevalent.

In my own system I use long and unequal speaker cables (6m and 16m respectively) and have had no problems, though I am now moving towards a system which will place the power amps (monoblocks) behind each speaker with balanced lines feeding them.

[magiccarpetride]

.........and this is a guy who sells cable?
He'll probably also tell you that they must, at all costs, be the same length. That's another good way of selling you something that you don't necessarily need.

No, he's the guy who's into cables, that's all. Makes his living via other channels.