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Dick Pierce Dick Pierce is offline
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Default Audio Interconnect cable Performance - is Return Wire Diameter a Factor?

On Thursday, December 3, 2020 at 9:47:46 AM UTC-5, Peter Wieck wrote:
First of all, let's make sure that we agree on terms:


And, just fo laughs, physical reality...

It is current that matters.


Well, it is the signal that matters...

The typical patch-cord from an active pre-amp of modern design may carry
as much as twenty (20) Volts


really?

REALLY?

Given that the vast majority of power amps have their gain set so that something
like 2 volts result in full power, a voltage of 20 volts would result in the amplifier
attempting (but failing rather miserably) at outputting 100 times its rated power.

So, let's consider the 20 volt numberf to be possibly true but completely irrelevant,
to paraphrase the lawyers.

at some small fraction of an amp,


Okay, so assume the amp has a 50 kOhm input impedance, and assuming our true
AND relevant voltage of 2 volts, that works out to:

I = E/R

I = 2.0 volts / 50kOhms

I = 0.00004 amperes

or 40 micro amps (a more realistic figure than I cam up with elsewhere.

So, not many electrons (amps),


Well, since we're piling on, let's, just for entertainment, see how many electrons
that is.

One Ampere is the same as one Coulomb per second.

An electron has a charge of 1.602 x 10^-17 Coulombs.

Thus, a continuous flowing current of 1 Ampere means there are 1.602 x 00^17
electrons (or, more precisely, the equivalent of 1.602 x 10^17) passing a point
each second. That's 6.4 x 10^12 electrons pass a point each second. But, to be
fair, the current is not continuous. So let's assume that we're looking at a small
interval of time, say 1 millisecond. We're down to 6.4 x 10^9 electrons in that
brief interval of time.

Yeah, 6,408,000,000, not a "lot" of electrons. And, in fact, all of them that (virtually)
got sent that way (or ones that are indistiguishable), they's comin' back son anyway.

The poont of this reductio ad absurdum is to show that for the domain of our
problem set (sending audio down a wire), moving electrons is, again as the lawyers
are wont to say, true but irrelevant: it's the aggregate movement of lots of charges,
jiggling about in a not-entirely-random fashion that results in the actual audio
"signal" being sent down the wire.

And when it comes to making our preamp drive our power amp and thence the
speakers, it's not them true but irrelevant electrons that we care about, it's the signal.
Consider, for example, making your cables out of paladium, raise the temperature
to about 300C, and embed it in a hyrdowen atmosphere. At that point, those wires
would work just as well, but instead of electrons being the mobile charges wondering
around a metallic crystal lattice, it would be protons the protons as the mobile
charges wandering around a mettalic crystal lattice.

As to the assertions suggested in the original post of this thread, one of the more
laughable and entertaining collection of pseudo-techno gobbledygook seen in
quite some time.

Dick Pierce