I’ve been long musing on speaker wires; the starting point is the assumption that a component is a part of the system without which the system won’t work or won’t work properly, whilst an accessory is something without which a system can work anyway. I will consider speaker wires components.
#1 I have placed my system in such a way that I now only need 1.2 mt. x side of speaker wire. I am aware that older Naim amps need to see the famous 1 microHenry and 17 picoFarad per mt. to work ideally, which means about 6 microHenry and 100 picoFarads for the recommended 5 to 7 mt. Average design of speaker wire doesn’t allow me to have 1.2 mt. runs with these specs; it should be something with a couple of inches or more separating the two conductors, and I’d have to make them myself. Ugly and inconvenient.
I guess that adding a 6/7 microHenry inductor to the wire would make no sense since it’s been Naim’s plan to avoid that in the first place; on the other hand my current Nait XS needs not any special specs for the wire.
So I guess I can use 1.2 mt. of about anything of decent quality and proper gauge. About which:
#2 I’ve long been interested in the topic of damping factor. Starting point here is the non-linear response of an amp to the variable impedance of the speaker vs frequency. What I understand is that since no speaker system is a resistive load and the use of output transformers linearises the behaviour a bit but at a cost, compromise must be accepted. Naim’s choice seems to be a relatively low DF and damped loudspeakers so that the generous current output of the amp will not be polluted by a large, undamped woofer’s backwards oscillations.
DF is an expression of the amp’s global output impedance, and this must be calculated adding wire’s and speaker’s resistance to it. Now a speaker wire’s own resistance is usually very low, a small fraction of unity, but it exists; it increases with length and diminishes with gauge. So, a smaller gauge wire will add some resistance to the amp’s output one, reducing the DF; hence allowing for more ‘free’ woofer movement. So why are audiophiles using thicker wires to have ‘more bass’? Thicker wire will reduce the global output impedance and increase DF, resulting in tighter, not deeper or fuller bass. Isn’t the use of thick wire one of the many expressions of most audiophiles’ synesthesia, by which looks and sound are commonly mistaken for one another - copper is mellow because it’s red, argent is brighter because it’s white, stone and glass bases make the sound harsher, and so on?
I once had my system disassembled for a couple of weeks due to who knows what. One night I wished to hear some music so I put something together - my Oppo DV980H DVD player, a Nait XS with a PowerLine, 2 x 15 mt. (fifteen) of Chord Campana wire (16AWG, 2 x 1.31 mm2) rather randomly coiled on the floor and Ariva speakers. Everything was excellent, bass deep and tight. I guess that 15 mt. of a small gauge wire must have acted as linear resistance added to the reciprocally variable one of amp and speakers, further reducing the XS’s DF. The result was rather pleasant.
NAC A5’s loop resistance, multiplied for the prescribed 6/7 mt., increases the amp’s output impedance of a relatively significant amount - from about 0.22 to 0.235ohms, thus reducing DF. Not a big deal, but is it the reason why longer runs of NAC A5 are supposed to ‘sound better’?
But the very last question I’m actually addressing is - what 1.2 mt. of wire will I be using? I still have two short runs of Chord Campana I refuse to ditch (the best VFM speaker cable I’ve ever had); its loop resistance/mt. must be higher than NAC A5’s, hence the XS’s DF is likely to be further reduced; but my IBLs have a small, damped woofer unlikely to create problems to the amp. And the Campana, I dare say, has one of the more solid, more coherent soundstages I’ve experienced, albeit at the cost of a minimal rolloff at both ends. I’m grateful to Adam Meredith who once suggested it to me.
I won’t apologise this time for my verbosity and the length and boredom of my post, because I have preventively alerted about its content… Thanks for corrections and a good day to everyone.
