Speaker cable lengths

[SiLew]

When I bought my current system about 3 years ago, I hadn’t bought decent hi-fi kit for perhaps 10yrs, and so was way off the pace with the latest kit, etc… (still am). I was advised to buy 5m lengths of speaker cable, as I was told that this is important.

I’m in the process of moving my hi-fi into a different room in the house, following some building work. I have Naim speaker cables, and they are black. In the new room, I have light grey porcelain tiles, and the ‘longer than required’ black cables don’t look great. I’m thinking to switch to white cables, and have them the correct length for the positioning of the speakers, with no excess coiled cable.

Is the 5m thing important, if so, how important ? 3m lengths would aesthetically work better for the space.

[Suedkiez]

Here’s the basics:

Speaker Cable for Naim power amplifiers

Naim power amplifiers do not have extra inductance networks in the output. Naim prefer the more elegant solution of allowing the speaker cable to provide the correct inductance and capacitance. To do so, a minimum of 3.5 metres per channel of NACA4 or NACA5 cable is required – although the optimum length is around 5-10 metres with a maximum recommended length of 20 metres. We find the supplied Naim speaker plugs to be an optimal match for the 4mm sockets we use on our amplifiers. In addition, …

The lengths here are predominantly for the classic amps. The Uniti amps are more tolerant. If your current 5 meters are too long for you and as you have an Atom, a shorter length will be fine, like 3 if this is ideal for you.

However, it is also easy to fold up the excess length of the cable you have and you may be able to hide the folds under/behind furniture

Edit: see this for folding:

Trying new speaker cables

For the speaker in the above picture there is no excess as the cable is approx. as long as it needs to be. The other one is folded up once, see more pictures in the post linked below (I was lucky that I could do one long fold). I’m not sure this makes much as a difference with NACA5 as opposed to floppy cables if the system is off to one side, you need to fold up anyway. As for the folds if you cannot do just one, see picture here to illustrate what @znai meant (I think):

[V.A.MKD]

If I’m on your place I will follow Naim recommendation. Old or new amps, old or new cables, for each one of them there is Min. Optimum and Max.
For me the most important thing is that design of the Naim amp finish at the end of speaker cable, so always look at an amp and speaker cable as a one product …