Cables - What does twisting do ?

[fatmarley]

It turns your cable into an air-cored Inductor

[Scooby]

Increases capacitance if it's + and - of a speaker cable you're twisting together. With some amps, it could get expensive

[alphaGT]

canceling out electromagnetic interference

What he said...

The phone company came up with it many years ago. The idea, basically, is that any EMF or radio waves that cut across the cable will be canceled out. As the wires keep changing position the voltages created by the crossing magnetic field will keep reversing, and canceling themselves out. So, it may help cut down on hum? Wires in the presence of large transformers can pick up hum, similar to the idea of humbucker pickups in a guitar. Their Idea being that one pickup is wound in one direction, and the other in the opposite. So any hum created by being near electronic equipment, will be equal but opposite and cancel themselves out as they are added together at the output. It actually works. Whether it's large enough to hear in a one meter patch cord is debatable. Most all instrument and microphone cable is made that way, I don't see where it hurts anything.


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[RothwellAudio]

Here's more detail about twisted pair wiring than you'll probably need:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisted_pair

[Barry]

Here's more detail about twisted pair wiring than you'll probably need:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisted_pair

The article is correct in so far as the regular transposing of the open wires suported on telegraph poles helped reduce common mode interference, but neglects to state that the increase in inductance so caused helps to prevent the dispersion of the signal pulse waveform. The idea of deliberately introducing some inductance (to match out the line capacitance) was suggested by Oliver Heaviside (and by Lord Kelvin, who analysed the phenomenon) in the 19th century.

[SquireC]

So do you use cable lifters? And if you do, how does it work?

Not cable lifters - hair claws (photo attached - hopefully). They're dirt cheap, can get them in various sizes. Even have my speaker cable lifted off the floor with claws spaced out to supoort it (use as few as possible)
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