From: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Subject: Re: using green marker on CDs
Reply-To: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 07:32:57 GMT

In article <1992Sep22.230818.16656@bbxrbk> russ@bbxrbk (Russ Kepler) writes:
>This is probably a bad time to bring up monster cables, then...


I will:

Monster cables are good quality extra-large diameter copper cables.  Various
claims have been made about these cables that are pure bullshit, because they
are barely measureable effects and are orders of magnitude beyond any 
reasonable need to care.  This includes such as the capacative loading, which
is insignificent at audio frequencies, and also inductive effects.  These
people are elevating audio cables into the rf spectrum.  I'm surprised they
aren't silver-plating them and claiming that's even better because of
skin effect :-).

In any case, the one justification for them is if ohmic drop matters to
your system.  Most speaker runs are short.  Just use heavy-duty zip cord and
you're done.  If the run is particularly long, then use monster cable.  This
presupposes that a significent loss occurs in the cable, an effect that is
marginally true only for long runs, and only for low-impedance speakers.  
The problem just isn't as significent for 8 or 16 ohm systems as for 4 ohm
speakers.  A good analogy is that most cars switches to 12 volts from 6 volts
in the battery system, so the starter cable got a lot lighter.  The reason
is that the current dropped and the voltage rose, the net power in the starter
staying the same.  Thus, lighter cable caused the same percentage of allowable
drop.  If the power wiring were especially long, the cable still had to be
fairly heavy, but most cars use a relatively short run of cable.

The ohmic consideration may be more than just a problem of pushing your
amp harder if possible to overcome the drop in the cable, since I doubt
that the difference is ever more than a few modest percent of the total
available amplifier power.  You can't make an argument for monster cable
of the form that your 200 watt/channel can only get 199.7 watss to the speaker
so you are using monster cable to ensure that you get 199.993 watts there.
These numbers are fairly accurate and show how meaningless the whole thing
usually is.  However, there is another consideration: the damping factor.

There is a whole almost-cult surrounding the notion that the damping factor
of an amplifier has to be absurdly high.

First of all, there are some designs of speakers that use low-damping factor.
I am even aware of speaker designs that have series resistors thus this 
argument is laughable in those instances.  (Electrostatics with matching
transformers using resistor/capacitor kludges to help linearize the step-up
transformers.)

Most speaker designs either don't care about damping factor or would at
least be happy for it to be 10 or so, yet there are claims of the importance
of it being in the 1000's.  The measurement of the damping factor at the
terminals of the amplifier will be severely influenced by uncontrollable
factors such as the age and condition of the output connector, which will
tend to age and slightly corrode.  Also, copper wire tends to crystalize with
age and heat, and slowly slightly loses conductivity.  Thus, damping factor
at the amp being beyond a few dozen sounds suspicious in practice, especially
after the equipment has been broken in a little.  Add onto this the additional
modest ohmic drop of reasonable cable, and also the connections at the speaker
and also internal to it, and you have an effective dropping of any *delivered*
damping factor from the point of view of the actual speaker drivers.  Moreover,
some speaker designs use inductors as part of cross-over networks, so when
their ohmic drop is figured in, the damping factor at the speaker element
itself may be even lower.

In any case, monster cable tends to play into the hands of these damping
factor fanatics, so what we have is a misused spec.  Yes, monster cable
can help to maintain a very high damping factor for its portion of the
circuit, especially if the speaker run is relatively long.  However, the
effective damping factor for the speaker will often be a lot lower than
is stated out of context about the amplifier and perfect dummy load, and
moreover, any alleged improvement derived from maintaining the damping
factor that high assuming it were to be so maintained, may in turn be a
bogus improvement, although true.

If anyone wants a definition of damping factor, that can be posted by me
or others, etc.

cj "use monster cable as car battery cable" l
Xref: sparky alt.folklore.science:3648 alt.folklore.urban:24833