Re: Monster Cables

getting to this late but, at least hypothetically,

> 1) speakers vary a lot

Agreed.

2) speakers are, in general, nonideal/nonlinear

Depends on what your ideal are. ;-)

3) a speaker's impedances vary a lot over frequency, for > instance

Usually. What about those full-range ribbons?

4) a speaker interacts with the room resonances, etc.

IME, a very weak interaction from the speaker terminal side.

5) this can in turn affect the nonlinearity of the > impedance, etc.

So small as to be hard to measure.

6) this, in turn, can affect some amps, particularl those > who themselves are nonideal, i.e. can't deliver virtually > unlimited current into virtual short circuits, for instance

Those kinds of heroics are completely unecessary with well-designed speakers. There are very few home audio speakers whose minimum impedance is not well-modeled by a resistor whose value is 3 ohms or more. That's nothing like a short circuit. Power amps that can handle that kind of load comfortably abound.

7) therefore, given a set of speakers, amps, and rooms, > none of which is particularly ideal, by chance some combination of > interactions will behave better than others

Almost all room/speaker interactions are confined to the acoustical side.

8) toss in some nonlinear cable designs, and you've got > yet another set of variables to toss in the mess, so that by chance > you now have speaker/amp/cable/room interactions which might "help", > particularly if you have a sound source which, itself, sounds better > with a little help.

Speaker cables are generally so linear that even measuring it, let alone hearing it, is close to mission impossible.

If by nonlinear you mean linear effects in the frequency domain, then almost all real world cables are dominated by relatively small amounts of series inductance. A small inductor in series with a 3 ohm or greater resistor (the worst load most speakers present) is a relatively easy load for any competent power amp.

none of this, even if true, would allow any near-ideally > behaved cable to tout itself as particularly superior to any other > near-ideally behaved cable, and sure wouldn't allow any cable with > oddball characteristics which suit a particular situation to brag > so.

Most of these exotic cables are well-modeled by same equivalent wire gauge twisted pair, on their best days of their lives. Some of them are actually worse than simple twisted pair, but again nothing that should upset a competent power amp.

Reply to
Arny Krueger
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