Best Speaker Cable??

John C wrote: If you want to know the true properties of tin, and how little lead is actually needed to stop the problems of lead free solder, just type 'tin pest' or 'tin plague' into your favourite search engine and have a good read. It's what Graham and I were doing a few years ago.   .................................   The above is how we felt as we tried many different components until eventually finding things that worked.

What gets me is that we noticed how it changed our products sound, but I've never heard one complaint about the manufacturers who kept silent...

Must be absolutely fantastically brilliant scientists to change over without a single snag, or that they're good at brainwashing their customers. Either that or a visit from "HM Weights and Measures" could expose they're still using Lead!

As you say Sol, braiding doesn't reject interference. The psu for the Wii is probably a switcher too. If so you're looking at anywhere between 20-40kHz rfi which would probably explain what you found. I've never really seen the point of braiding speaker cables/high level audio. We used to braid or twist cables for low level audio when I worked in broadcast and recording audio but only for balanced circuits as it reduces crosstalk. These cables also usually had a screen of some kind, whether it be an individual screen for each pair of wires or an overall screen for anything from 4-pair to 50-pair multicore (a bit like the stuff in the green boxes in the street - BT). I'm talking similar types of run lengths too (sometimes kilometres not metres). Given the right environment these cables may perform perfectly well but in these days of 'energy efficiency' more equipment is using switch-mode supplies and the wrong placement of these will cause some problems. I'd always use a screened interconnect. Watch out for energy saving lightbulbs too. When we first built the new workshop at Grahams everything we tested was giving a high noise reading, that was until we removed the new bulb from above the test gear and replaced it with a good old filament type. We've since rearranged the test gear.

Edited by John C - 24 Jan 2008 at 11:10am