I have qualifications in Radio Frequency Engineering. Skin effect is real. The higher the frequency the greater the effect and cable construction becomes more important. Skin effect occurs at audio frequencies but is so vanishingly small that it can be ignored and will have absolutely no audible effect.
I think the audiophile needs to be more concerned with RF sensitivity due to bandwidth of semiconductors - large RF amplification can lead to instability and power consumption that impacts the semiconductor's ability to process audio frequencies. Think of it as your engine working hard for something you can't see, leaving little to no power for driving your car. It makes sense therefore to look at the filtering, power supply decoupling, shielding and PCB layout in the design of audio devices itself.
Today it's not a problem. originally all HIFI cables were solid not stranded. If we can perfect carrying this new technology of full range audio sent to the ear by laser then it may become a new problem
My buddy was over the other day and we went down to my music room to grab a putter for him ( I keep my putters in my music room haha ). And he was kinda shocked how it looked and what I had. We started having a quick talk about the gear and why I started this and what keeps me listening to music almost everyday in my hifi room. He was astonished the money I have spent said it was a waste. I would spend around 10,000 a year before on eating out and entertaining at the pub and restaurant and it got me nothing really. I explained to him the feeling I get when I find a new album and when in a well treated room it can give such a strong emotional feeling, makes the hair stand up and just think wow. He sat down and I put a track on made him close his eyes and he was shocked. Just putting on thriller by mj just shocked him with all the sounds coming from all over. When people ask me why I love music so much… my reply is goosebumps… constant mission on making my hair stand up and I love it!
I have bumped into the skin effect while listening to music. The music was on the record player in the corner of the lab while I was working on unrelated signals at 800MHz at -80dBm on the bench.
Thanks for this interesting information. As an electrical engineer I did calculations on cables for frequencies above 1GHz. Especially when it comes to high power and high frequencies, the skin effects need to be considered. It saves money as you just need a tube and not solid material. An audio signals might have harmonics up to 100KHz (e.g. a 10KHz square signal has a lot harmonics) but even then, the skin effect is very little.
Well said Mathhias !! The problem with buyers of such Snake Oil is that, they will happily buy real Electronics and Mechanics based on their Physics and Maths, but when they fall little short of their expectation, spend double the money on these Snake Oil, which has NO backing of (measurably) Science !! And when Engineers who design such Audio-Video-Radio Electronics debunk their Snake-oil, these Audiophiles try to gaslight the Engineer to have not been enough verses in "Art of Music"
I design high-power AM, FM, VHF radio transmitters for a living. In the real world, we use Litze-wire, which is a lot of really fine strands of copper wires individually lacquered and twisted to make a cable. Each strand is the radius of the skin depth, making each strand "all skin". Using 250 of these (typically) in parallel makes the resulting cable "all skin", saving the need for silver, or some ridiculous manufacturing process to hollow out the centre to save weight/material cost. The skin depth depends on the frequency. We typically use Litze-wire from 500 kHz up to several tens of MHz, with powers from 500 W to 10 kW. Below that, normal wire does not get hot enough to warrent the use of Litze, and above, other methods are more efficient. For audio frequencies, the skin effect is negligible compared to the capacitance between the two wires. In fact it is so tiny that it can be ignored.
I can't be worrying about this now, I have just spent all my money upgrading to audiophile light switches and I am saving for an audiophile garden hose!
At 2:23 "Of course, the effect becomes greater the more you worry about it." - so true! If you are making hollow wave-guides to carry radio signal currents to an antennae in the GHz frequencies, the wave-guides can be built out of something inexpensive and strong like steel that is not the best conductor. Then coat the inexpensive metal with a thin layer of silver, which is an excellent conductor. Due to the skin effect the radio frequency currents are carried in the silver layer. The silver will in turn be coated with something non-conductive to prevent it from oxidizing. This effort is not required for audio frequencies.
In my experience, any percieved differences [usually HF loss or even hum] in cable performance is due to poor or failing cable/connector interfaces. EG. bad solder or crimping points. I am confident that at audio freqencies in double blind tests, no one would be able detect differences in cables due to the skin effect alone.
It seems to me that music/audio is at its optimum state when it is being mixed or mastered in the studio. The mix/master engineers are really the only people who get to listen to the audio in its purest form. From that point, the rest of the world has to listen to the audio, which was finalised in a studio, using equipment and acoustic treatment that is different to that of the original studio. Surely audiophiles should be trying to replicate the exact conditions to be found in the studio, worts and all, and that means using the same box standard interconnectors. Or am I missing something here?
It's been a long time since electrical class. My understanding was that it was primarily higher voltages where this is more of an issue. High voltage overhead power lines for example.
There are some speaker cables which work based on skin effect. I use the $1400 ten feet long Silversmith Audio Fidelium speaker cables, which totally depends on skin effect (which tries to maximum surface area, with strands which are less than a thousandth of an inch thick). I use these on a system which costs over $100,000 and see no reason to get a more expensive set of speaker cables. When I upgraded from a set of 10 foot long $1300 Transparent Musicwave Super cables, I found the improvement to be very dramatic. Of course, if you only have a $1000 system, you might not notice any difference.
@@peanutbutterjellyjam2179 What's funny is that people seem to think that I am joking. I made this post to point out that there is more to this issue. I discovered this speaker cable from a review that a guy who had a $750,000 system made. His reference pair of speaker cables costed about $18,000, and he upgraded to this $1400 pair. I wasn't sure what it would be like, but since it had a 30 day money back guarantee, I decided to try it out. I was surprised at how good it was so now use it in my system. I find that people tend to to have pretty rigid beliefs. So much so, that there is a saying in some research fields: "For those who say that it can't be done, get out of the way of those doing it!". I remember back in the late 80's hearing about the differences in US versus Russian Space Shuttle design. The burn patterns from re-entry of the Russia space shuttle wasn't possible from US understood science. This suggests that no matter how smart people think they are, they aren't necessary right (which includes me). They believe themselves to be right and won't examine something if it does not fit their existing world view. The problem is that they can miss out on a lot of potential benefits.
Among many audiophiles “resistance is futile!“ The attraction to high priced propaganda based products makes them irresistible! They have a neurological condition known as “Ohms (OHMy those will sound amazing!) Law” which almost entirely lowers purchasing resistance!😅
I love music.. play and record.. and listen most days.. I have a nice set of speakers and a reasonable amp and good dac.. I use wilco £2.50/m cable and it sounds absolutely fine
I don't worry about cable skin effect, and in addition, cable inductance and capacitance, simply because their effects are so tiny as to be irrelevant. Thickish speaker cables are necessary to keep their resistance down which is really all I would subscribe to.
The "skin effect" this going to be a touchy subject. So how about throwing a can of worms onto it. I've got news for all....the powe from sorce(amplifier)to the receiver(speaker) isn't transferred through the electrons in the wire. The electrons are more like excited sheep bumping into each other in a tunnel. They are reacting to the electromagnetic field generated around the wire from the sorce and receiver. The power is actually a vector going from the sorce directly to the receiver (more like light and at the speed of light) traveling in the electromagnetic feild defined by the sorce, wire and receiver. So like those sheep the electrons are actually robbing power from the system by bumping into each other and dissipating it as heat. Sorry Phil 😢😂. The bottom line is the wire needs to be big enough for the number of sheep and the insulator strong enough to contain them ... and yes a few are going to get away in the chaos as long as that is kept so a few in the overall picture... God will take care of them because they are His after all and the rest will not notice so much.
@@welderfixer thanks I had just learned some new stuff about how power is transferred (it seems that it's more like transmission) it makes sense when you consider the capacitor in the cross over network and the physical break in the connection. My brother (nuclear engineer in a power plant) and I had a good discussion about this and we both came to think this is true and made sense.
The problem is, that chain is just as strong as the weakest link on it. There is no point to have better cables or anything that the equipments used on the recording.
You could argue that the sound is being further degraded by using the same cables again though.I know some studios have upgraded their cabling, but when you listen to those recordings from the sixties and seventies the proof is in the listening that the cables available worked okay then, & we hold so may of those recordings as all time greats, so yes. Maybe the recording engineers are the weakest link when it comes to a decent sound.
Grown fonder each upload with ur foray into technical Audiophile land, Please put together something on "HIFI GRADE" vs " LAB GRADE" the first term does not really exist but is used very often
I used to work for a company that used skin effect to look for cracks in metal joints that had been subjected to bending forces. Essentially you send a high frequency signal through a chunk of metal and measure the voltage drop between two points. If there is a crack the current has to travel further (down and up the crack) and you can measure this. Bigger the crack, the bigger the voltage drop. So there is another thing to worry about (or not) cables with cracks in the surface layers with present an even higher resistance to high frequencies. So now you need cables that have never been bent.
The guy at the very end in the upper right corner with his insane over the top cable design: 2 speaker cables, only $165,999.99 Sound improvement = .00213%!
I see one need to be quite careful when stripping the loudspeaker wire - if you accidentally cut some of all the thin outer lying wires making up the cable all the high frequencies are lost in action or at least a big proportion of them 😁. I wonder what quality of cables are used inside the components.
For you grounding consider that 20KHz goes several meters deep in the typical dirt. This means that your system ground is very well connected to planet earth if you ground all your audio at one point. Grounding can reduce hum pickup. The filters required to meet FCC generally mean that your whole audio setup ends up at about 50V vs planet earth, In the days of tubes, this was hard to do on any sort of budget. Today, transistors are basically free. An engineer can throw 10 more of them at a design if needed and not increase the cost more than the cost of the power switch or volume knob. "brighter" and many terms like that are very poorly defined. They are generally not well defined because in many cases the effect is pure imagination. Modern audio gear has a very flat gain and a near constant time delay over the audio band. For low impedance a 4 wire braided cable works better than two twisted conductors. If you braid two red and two back #14 wires together then parallel the same color wires, you will get a lower impedance than with a twisted #12 pair. Ribbon cable can work to get a cable under a rug. With a 100 wire ribbon you can use every other vs the other every as a speaker connection.
Skin effect is much higher than 40khz on wire. However, with a high end transparent system there I found better sound with cable lifts above the floor. Perhaps the floor can cause change in inductance/capacitance on a cable as well. I encourage you test with your ears...
As they say you pays your money & takes your choice, I enjoy the sound from my silver interconnects,but I have never been convinced that a silver wired mains lead would make any difference.
I'm not sure what point you're making by comparing the 0.8mm cable to the 3mm cable with 685 skin effect. 100% of a 0.8mm cable is 0.5mm^2, but the outer 68% of a 3mm cable is 6.3mm^2. So, even taking skin effect into account, the 3mm cable still has a much higher effective cross-section (i.e., much lower resistance) than the 0.8mm cable. (No, I'm not an audiophile. I can't hear anything. I haven't spent money on anything.)
Hey, with the new technological advances made theses days, maybe a speaker cable could be made using a crossover which would shunt the high frequencies to the center of a multi metal layered design whereby the center section has been made favorable for high frequencies. Wealthy audiophiles could rest then.
The higher the frequency, the higher the resistance (impedance) from your speakers, so the skin effect is absolutely nothing to worry about in comparison. As a silly comparison, say your speakers impedance rises to 100 Ohm, the skin effect would add 0.0001 Ohm on top of that. I'm sure someone can come up with the correct numbers, (but still negligeable).
Already 40 years ago I read an article in an informative magazine... (for those old enough who know what that is). In the article they explained you can best use solid installation cable for your speakers, and nail them to your plinth about 10cm apart to avoid them working as a capacitor. I can't remember the arguments though, and I doubt I can tell the difference.
Capacitor in pF/nF range won't effect Audio Frequency. The problem is, Audio Snake oil seller sell Audio stuff with science for MHz and GHz Radio Frequency range. Gross Misappropriation !
Left out the t ,the skint effect after purchase. Its the usual addressing the so called symptom whilst ignoring the real problem, imperfect Loudspeakers.
For an entertaining read on the subject, find a copy of Allen Wright's "Supercables Cookbook". I have tried a recipe or two from this and they worked for me. As ever, your mileage may vary...
As we know most current is carried on the skin. The way to resolve this is to use hollow conductors...... Like they do in electrical substations.....And some transmission lines. And no - I am not joking. Look it up. Hollow conductors save money on material. I'm sure the Hi-Fi manufacturers will be able to parlay it the other way and charge more for less as they will claim it is better! 🙂
I doubt any expensive woo woo line level, low impedance cable or silver fancy speaker cable would sound or scope any different then good grade low capacitance coaxial or good grade 10 or 14 gage copper wire, in a blindfold test. I remember wiring two speakers at a party, one channel cheap RadioShack 20 gauge and the other a 14 gauge camping extension cord 20 ft lengths. The RadioShack side sounded like the tweeter was blown. I scrounged around and found some expensive 14 gauge speaker wire, then used it to replace the twenty gauge stuff. Funny thing, even switching the amp to mono, no one could hear the difference between the expense 14 gauge speaker wire or the camping 14 guage cord! ElectroVoice has tables on what gauge to use for differing applications of speakers. Short run wires, low volume efficient drivers 16 gauge may be sufficient. Long run, 25 ft, loud inefficient driver between 10 to 14 gauge wire, probably is necessary. If 14 guage copper just gets the job done, 10 won't improve it, and 16 gauge silver won't get it done.
Yes, skin effect is a thing.... like most disinformation, they latch onto a grain of irrelevant truth and twist it in order to manipulate us. I can remember from my days as a US Navy radar and radio technician, Skin effect is the reason we use waveguide for Radar signals, but not for Hf (3-30MHZ) Radio signals because it's negligible... irrelevant for signals that are 10 times the audible frequency, so the frequencies we can hear aren't even 1/10 as high as they would need to be for skin effect to matter.
the skin effect is of interest to RF design. talking about it in audio engineering, despite being 'measurable' at a few kilohertz, is almost funny considering its minute effect.
Oh yes, litz to litz jumping. Very big deal. Also, take into account the oxidization of non-OFC cable and how oxidization crystals create sort of resistors... I can only guess it's fun being so s*tupid as your average audiophile. We should dub it fore*skin-effect.
the only skineffect i have experienced in my 60 years of listening to audio have been the goosebumps i sometimes have experienced listening to certain artists or at very rare occations loudspeakers or a combo of both. 😀 in such cases there is only one solution : buy the damn thing and bring it home to marvel over.
You beet me, I was about to suggest Litz wire speaker cables..... There has been a few designers who have gone down the multi-conductor channel, although stuffing it all up by adding heaps of capacitance in the process, This is a known source of amplifier instability - bad. To me, the better route is to avoid low impedance speakers, 4ohms and below, so the resistance of the speaker wire has less effect. Or just get old like me, where age has a far greater effect on higher audio frequencies than skin effect ever will have. I was advised that old age is bad for your health, don't go there.
Only if each strand is separately insulated - enamal coated - which is the Litz wire he mentioned at the end. That is used in radio frequency electronics, but companies like Cardas offer it in audio cables. If the strands are all bare conductor, they act mostly like a single solid conductor. Unless they start to oxidize on the surface. If that happens, any cable begins to sound (and measure) badly.
As an engineer I can honestly say it's rare to hear such a load of cobblers spoken. If you are generating vast amounts of Kw from a generator then yep, possibly a problem. Put it this way. The bigger the power output the bigger the cable used, not silver coating. The only place this is a problem is on hugh frequency EMF which has to be earthed on a generator and the simple solution is to use cheap flat braided earth bonding. If you think you have a 'problem' feel the cable. Hot? No, it isn't thus the cable is perfectly suitable.
and it may use less depth ( skin effect ) but it uses more surface area which cancels this out as it still uses the same skin area effect . and the more power the more it penetrates and the less power the less it penetrates . its resistaance in the wire building up as the flow increases higher currents consume more of the wire lesser currents consume lessof the wire and sliver and copper wouldnt tramsit the adio at a speed that would make any pesevable difference when it travels at the speed of light is a mans brain an oscilloscope ? no electric traveling around the world 8 times in 8 seconds with a 0.000001 speed differece will not be noticed. some people think they are the hearing Gods.
Only one thing to do to settle this. We must let Amir measure it. I do have a treasure trove of silver but mostly bars and coins. Alas, no silver speaker cables.
Amir hates Audiophiles, he has a huge following of audiophile haters. If you want REAL audio measurements and facts which inlcuding live testing so that even you can hear the difference, something which Amir doesn't do, then check out Alpha Audio.
I spent $70 for 100 feet of pro speaker cable and I believe I heard a bit more dynamics in the tweeters over my previous cables which were lamp cords. HUGE improvements were made with mids and highs when I dialed in the woofer and subwoofer gain (50% lower). They had been muddy before hand.
You did this one wrong. This seems as if you're giving some credit to the whole nonsense. in first few seconds you might've said that skin-effect happens at lightning bolt levels such as a few MW and the story would end then and there.
Audiophiles believe so much bunk that is totally de-bunked by real science. The only real science at work that they totally ignore is PLACEBO effect. Somehow it doesn't effect "golden ears". Hi end audio is a gear collecting hobby, which is fine but ends up straying far from what matters to music or what actually affects what our ears can hear.
Exactly! Irrelevant. Got to love Audio mentally (Ph)ill. An audiophile spouting off about properties of a piece of gear that are totally irrelevant to, and have no effect on whatsoever in reproducing audio.
The BIGGEST Problem of Audio-Piles ( not Audiophiles) is that, they suffer from massive Placebo effect / buyer remorse syndrome and supplement their Tech Hardware spending with evermore spending on these Snake-oil sellers, who sell these paraphernalia like obscenely costly cables, stands, isolator. YOU guys over engineer your listening gear, to the extent that they even surpass the spending on corresponding elements even on Recording studios. The SKIN EFFECT on Audio Frequency Non-Linearity is exceedingly negligible, specially for 1-3 Meters of RCA/Speaker cables. So Please please please, keep these Horse Shit with you, Audio-Moses !!
Indeed the skin effect is real, but for normal, practical analogue audio interconnects the frequencies are too low for this to be a concern. In any case, if audiophiles are really worried about this, both the DAC and amp should be _inside_ the speaker, and the connection between the source and speaker should be digital. That way the overall analogue cabling can be kept the shortest.
The skin effect is real but in terms of audio perceptible to the human ear, it's utter bunk. There's no way that the skin effect is causing an appreciable fall off in frequency response. There's not a chance that there is even 1 dB of difference. Chasing after cables to mitigate the effect is simply another way to waste money.
I beg to differ - They are not wasting money, they are making generous and voluntary charitable donations to R&D labs the world over, thus allowing the rest of us to obtain better equipment at a more reasonable price point. I think we owe them a bit of gratitude! (/s, of course).
I build speakers with FR driver and added woofer and use acrossover filter for the FR driver. I found that my steel alligator clip cables sound different to my standard copper cable. I used the steel alligator cables for trial&error connection. But after discovering that they sound different, I no longer use them. I now use cut off bits of my copper wire (without the alligator clips) for trail&error. Less convenient but way more accurate. So cables would have to make a difference. The difference in my case was so great that I had to change a resistor when I changed to my copper wire (after usinging the steel cables) on the crossover.
Oddly enough I was just discussing this with a friend (also a RUclips audio channel presenter) in the last two days. I did calculations and determined that with the wire being used for some interconnects we were contemplating, the skin effect should have no effects of any reasonable concern until at least somewhere well above 260-300khz. As neither of us are bats (last time we checked anyway), we laughed it off and carried on. 🤣
Audio Phil sounds like the kind of guy who has a six figure system that generates a showroom side with severely lit up upper mids, which is only suitable to maximum 10 minute listening sessions and even then only with pristine recordings. :)
I’m an electrical engineer and I thought this video was gonna be mocking audiophiles for obsessing over differences you wouldn’t actually be able to perceive, but I guess not 😅
@@MrBanzoid That and ... so many "knowledgeable" people have written about this that nobody can actually find the truth anymore. Very simply: Audio cables are NOT feedlines. All this talk about stuff that only matters at radio frequencies is just bunk.
Nothing personal but let me be blunt. This was very interesting but a waste of time, if people think that skin effect has any effect on audio then they are crazy, let them waste their money. they are morons. Bottom line skin effect has no place in a conversation in audio, now you want to talk about microwave and wave guides then we can talk skin effect.
I have a pair of RCA cables made of Litz wire which I made about 40 years ago. I know where they are, but it has been decades since I’ve used them, because I now know what I’m doing and I’m sure it doesn’t make any difference.
"Hearing" the effects of the skin effect at such a low frequency with one's vastly imperfect pressure-to-neuronal activity transducers (ears they call'em) is on par with delusions during a manic episode. It's also an alarm to see a shrink asap, with the possibility of remaining there for treatment…
Anyone who thinks their domestic audio interconnects must vastly exceed the quality and expense of a typical studio microphone cable forgets that the latter is unavoidably part of their signal chain.
Two points; at 6:10 where you discuss the effect at 20KHz, being the skin depth is 68% of your conductor. Although noted, it's good to remember that this point isn't a "brick wall", it's the point where 63% of the current is carried, the remaining 37% of current is still below this depth. The effect is therefore less than expected. The other, is the topic of surface roughness, where "how smooth" the conductor surface matters. The roughness alters the the impedance for high frequency signals traveling at the very edge of the conductor. Whilst really a concern on PCB traces, it does have a measurable effect on in co-ax cable. Certainly in the >40GHz range, but that little frequency-detail won't bother the serious audiophile. I give to Audio Phil conductor surface roughness as a new audiophile toy. :- ) And yes, I literally have in the past polished PCB traces….but that’s a RF story. Bum, thats two things for Phil now....
And here you have the reason I've been telling people that thinner cables are better for interconnects. It's painfully simple... at audio frequencies the skin depth in copper is greater than the diameter of the wire... so the whole thing is used. The same is true for speaker wires... at 30khz the skin depth is like 95% of a 16ga lamp cord and since it is stranded wire, this depth is greater than each strand, so eddy currents are greatly reduced and you're only messing with 0.004 ohms of resistance per foot. Now if you want a REAL reason not to use horse-dong sized wires, consider that *surface area* is a grand multiplier of the cable's potential to pick up stray signals. Take any antenna and double it's diameter and watch what happens to your signal strength meter... bigger wires make better antennas. But hey... I'm just a lowly technician, what could I possibly know....
But but but...the ultimate in "fidelityness" can ONLY be obtained through cables as thick as a python! Because they are expensive and hi-fi magazines said so! :P
I think one should definitely be concerned about the copper cables and PCB's used in audio production. After that we can obsess about the 50 or so dirty opamp sections used in music production electronics...
Guitar cables are subjected to an effect that can seem similar to the skin effect if the cable becomes several meters long, and you will then hear a clear decrease in brightness, a good countermeasure to this problem is to plug it through a buffer that converts the signal from high impedance to low impedance, and it will be capable of retaining those frequencies through said cable. By the same logic I would think active pickups would completely remedy this problem before even reaching the cable. the reason guitar cables are subject to this problem is because its core and shielding together can act like a capacitor, driving those higher frequencies to ground. Considering a buffer can retain the quality of a signal across a long capacitor I would claim that an "audiophile grade" power/pre amplifier should be able to retain the quality of a signal though a regular copper cable without any audible issues at all
@@kevingest5452 yea its not. the skin effect is an inductive effect. The guitar cable is a capacitive effect created between the cable's shielding and its core, leaking higher frequencies to ground, thus dulling the sound before reaching the amp. The reason I said they can seem similar is because they both result in loss of high frequencies proportional to its cable length. the guitar cable is just way worse
The late great Roger Russell of McIntosh talked about speaker cables and the rending of garments, the wailing and gnashing of teeth over speaker cables. He recommended 18 gauge wire because the extra resistance helped with damping factor.
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"The effect is greater the more you worry about it" is pure gold! 💰
I was just going to quote that too..... very funny.
I have qualifications in Radio Frequency Engineering. Skin effect is real. The higher the frequency the greater the effect and cable construction becomes more important. Skin effect occurs at audio frequencies but is so vanishingly small that it can be ignored and will have absolutely no audible effect.
Thanks for the Clarification
In other words you're just another sh*it4brains who doesn't have a first clue on audio? Thanks for the clarification.
if a device exists that can measure that, it would most certainly be way more expensive that a complete eardrum transplant would cost ya...
I think the audiophile needs to be more concerned with RF sensitivity due to bandwidth of semiconductors - large RF amplification can lead to instability and power consumption that impacts the semiconductor's ability to process audio frequencies. Think of it as your engine working hard for something you can't see, leaving little to no power for driving your car.
It makes sense therefore to look at the filtering, power supply decoupling, shielding and PCB layout in the design of audio devices itself.
Today it's not a problem. originally all HIFI cables were solid not stranded. If we can perfect carrying this new technology of full range audio sent to the ear by laser then it may become a new problem
The only skin effect I'm interested in is when the music gives me chills.
Or, she does what she does and you enjoy it
@@listeningto8371 Well, there's always that. 🤐
My buddy was over the other day and we went down to my music room to grab a putter for him ( I keep my putters in my music room haha ). And he was kinda shocked how it looked and what I had. We started having a quick talk about the gear and why I started this and what keeps me listening to music almost everyday in my hifi room. He was astonished the money I have spent said it was a waste. I would spend around 10,000 a year before on eating out and entertaining at the pub and restaurant and it got me nothing really. I explained to him the feeling I get when I find a new album and when in a well treated room it can give such a strong emotional feeling, makes the hair stand up and just think wow. He sat down and I put a track on made him close his eyes and he was shocked. Just putting on thriller by mj just shocked him with all the sounds coming from all over. When people ask me why I love music so much… my reply is goosebumps… constant mission on making my hair stand up and I love it!
or both@@listeningto8371
I have bumped into the skin effect while listening to music. The music was on the record player in the corner of the lab while I was working on unrelated signals at 800MHz at -80dBm on the bench.
Thanks for this interesting information. As an electrical engineer I did calculations on cables for frequencies above 1GHz. Especially when it comes to high power and high frequencies, the skin effects need to be considered. It saves money as you just need a tube and not solid material.
An audio signals might have harmonics up to 100KHz (e.g. a 10KHz square signal has a lot harmonics) but even then, the skin effect is very little.
I hope you're not listening to square waves on your stereo..
@@razisn Do you know what kind of wave forms music consist of?
Who cares about the 100kHz harmonics? You can't hear them unless you're a bat.
Let's all use waveguides instead of cables! 🤣
Well said Mathhias !! The problem with buyers of such Snake Oil is that, they will happily buy real Electronics and Mechanics based on their Physics and Maths, but when they fall little short of their expectation, spend double the money on these Snake Oil, which has NO backing of (measurably) Science !! And when Engineers who design such Audio-Video-Radio Electronics debunk their Snake-oil, these Audiophiles try to gaslight the Engineer to have not been enough verses in "Art of Music"
I design high-power AM, FM, VHF radio transmitters for a living.
In the real world, we use Litze-wire, which is a lot of really fine strands of copper wires individually lacquered and twisted to make a cable. Each strand is the radius of the skin depth, making each strand "all skin". Using 250 of these (typically) in parallel makes the resulting cable "all skin", saving the need for silver, or some ridiculous manufacturing process to hollow out the centre to save weight/material cost. The skin depth depends on the frequency.
We typically use Litze-wire from 500 kHz up to several tens of MHz, with powers from 500 W to 10 kW. Below that, normal wire does not get hot enough to warrent the use of Litze, and above, other methods are more efficient.
For audio frequencies, the skin effect is negligible compared to the capacitance between the two wires. In fact it is so tiny that it can be ignored.
Electrical Engineer here. Everything you said is absolutely >spot on
I scraped the skin off my cables and it seemed to help.
I can't be worrying about this now, I have just spent all my money upgrading to audiophile light switches and I am saving for an audiophile garden hose!
Don't forget the light bulbs...
At 2:23 "Of course, the effect becomes greater the more you worry about it." - so true!
If you are making hollow wave-guides to carry radio signal currents to an antennae in the GHz frequencies, the wave-guides can be built out of something inexpensive and strong like steel that is not the best conductor. Then coat the inexpensive metal with a thin layer of silver, which is an excellent conductor. Due to the skin effect the radio frequency currents are carried in the silver layer. The silver will in turn be coated with something non-conductive to prevent it from oxidizing. This effort is not required for audio frequencies.
In my experience, any percieved differences [usually HF loss or even hum] in cable performance is due to poor or failing cable/connector interfaces. EG. bad solder or crimping points.
I am confident that at audio freqencies in double blind tests, no one would be able detect differences in cables due to the skin effect alone.
Audio Phil is pure genius. Has me laughing out loud every time!
This is why in low profile substations we use hollow tubes as busbars, no need have solid core.
Audio Snob feels real with Phil filled with thrill.
It seems to me that music/audio is at its optimum state when it is being mixed or mastered in the studio. The mix/master engineers are really the only people who get to listen to the audio in its purest form. From that point, the rest of the world has to listen to the audio, which was finalised in a studio, using equipment and acoustic treatment that is different to that of the original studio. Surely audiophiles should be trying to replicate the exact conditions to be found in the studio, worts and all, and that means using the same box standard interconnectors. Or am I missing something here?
Does Phil write his own stuff ? because he's good, really good! Great topic and I'm sure the chat is gonna light up...cheers.
As my ears can hear microwave frequencies and beyond I have to buy expensive interconnects.
lol
Yes, It's a curse !
It's been a long time since electrical class. My understanding was that it was primarily higher voltages where this is more of an issue. High voltage overhead power lines for example.
Higher frequencies... like broadcast frequencies. Voltage has little effect here on skin depth.
You are thinking current, not voltage.
@@johnelectric933
Still not an issue ... especially at 50 or 50hz.
Another excellent and thought provoking video.
There are some speaker cables which work based on skin effect. I use the $1400 ten feet long Silversmith Audio Fidelium speaker cables, which totally depends on skin effect (which tries to maximum surface area, with strands which are less than a thousandth of an inch thick). I use these on a system which costs over $100,000 and see no reason to get a more expensive set of speaker cables. When I upgraded from a set of 10 foot long $1300 Transparent Musicwave Super cables, I found the improvement to be very dramatic. Of course, if you only have a $1000 system, you might not notice any difference.
LOL!
LOL!
Thanks, "Phil".
Heh, good one!🤣
@@peanutbutterjellyjam2179 What's funny is that people seem to think that I am joking. I made this post to point out that there is more to this issue. I discovered this speaker cable from a review that a guy who had a $750,000 system made. His reference pair of speaker cables costed about $18,000, and he upgraded to this $1400 pair. I wasn't sure what it would be like, but since it had a 30 day money back guarantee, I decided to try it out. I was surprised at how good it was so now use it in my system. I find that people tend to to have pretty rigid beliefs. So much so, that there is a saying in some research fields: "For those who say that it can't be done, get out of the way of those doing it!". I remember back in the late 80's hearing about the differences in US versus Russian Space Shuttle design. The burn patterns from re-entry of the Russia space shuttle wasn't possible from US understood science. This suggests that no matter how smart people think they are, they aren't necessary right (which includes me). They believe themselves to be right and won't examine something if it does not fit their existing world view. The problem is that they can miss out on a lot of potential benefits.
Among many audiophiles “resistance is futile!“
The attraction to high priced propaganda based products makes them irresistible!
They have a neurological condition known as “Ohms (OHMy those will sound amazing!) Law” which almost entirely lowers purchasing resistance!😅
Pure Gold Comment.
I love music.. play and record.. and listen most days.. I have a nice set of speakers and a reasonable amp and good dac.. I use wilco £2.50/m cable and it sounds absolutely fine
You must be rightly spending more on Music more than Audio Snake Oils !!
I don't worry about cable skin effect, and in addition, cable inductance and capacitance, simply because their effects are so tiny as to be irrelevant.
Thickish speaker cables are necessary to keep their resistance down which is really all I would subscribe to.
100% agree. I'm not running welding level power at radio frequencies out to my speakers.
The "skin effect" this going to be a touchy subject. So how about throwing a can of worms onto it. I've got news for all....the powe from sorce(amplifier)to the receiver(speaker) isn't transferred through the electrons in the wire. The electrons are more like excited sheep bumping into each other in a tunnel. They are reacting to the electromagnetic field generated around the wire from the sorce and receiver. The power is actually a vector going from the sorce directly to the receiver (more like light and at the speed of light) traveling in the electromagnetic feild defined by the sorce, wire and receiver. So like those sheep the electrons are actually robbing power from the system by bumping into each other and dissipating it as heat. Sorry Phil 😢😂. The bottom line is the wire needs to be big enough for the number of sheep and the insulator strong enough to contain them ... and yes a few are going to get away in the chaos as long as that is kept so a few in the overall picture... God will take care of them because they are His after all and the rest will not notice so much.
@@stevengagnon4777 Awesome reply!! Great analogy!! Best I've ever read. I'm using that.
@@welderfixer thanks I had just learned some new stuff about how power is transferred (it seems that it's more like transmission) it makes sense when you consider the capacitor in the cross over network and the physical break in the connection. My brother (nuclear engineer in a power plant) and I had a good discussion about this and we both came to think this is true and made sense.
@@stevengagnon4777 I used your sheep discrimination to explain electric to a young lady today. She got it!
Please have a great day!
The problem is, that chain is just as strong as the weakest link on it. There is no point to have better cables or anything that the equipments used on the recording.
we use damp string in my studio
You could argue that the sound is being further degraded by using the same cables again though.I know some studios have upgraded their cabling, but when you listen to those recordings from the sixties and seventies the proof is in the listening that the cables available worked okay then, & we hold so may of those recordings as all time greats, so yes. Maybe the recording engineers are the weakest link when it comes to a decent sound.
Yeah... shit in, shit out.
Grown fonder each upload with ur foray into technical Audiophile land, Please put together something on "HIFI GRADE" vs " LAB GRADE" the first term does not really exist but is used very often
Are there any blind testing to prove that anyone can actually hear skin effect in a home stero setting?
It's such an embarrassingly trivial matter that nobody in their right mind would try it.
Must be 20 years ago I've read something about skin effect in audiophile magazines
I used to work for a company that used skin effect to look for cracks in metal joints that had been subjected to bending forces. Essentially you send a high frequency signal through a chunk of metal and measure the voltage drop between two points. If there is a crack the current has to travel further (down and up the crack) and you can measure this. Bigger the crack, the bigger the voltage drop. So there is another thing to worry about (or not) cables with cracks in the surface layers with present an even higher resistance to high frequencies. So now you need cables that have never been bent.
🙂
Lifting a veil with those, I think beautiful and new, glasses? And how do you know that is not pyscheo-acoustics?
The guy at the very end in the upper right corner with his insane over the top cable design: 2 speaker cables, only $165,999.99 Sound improvement = .00213%!
Thank You ....that was deep.. had no idea.
I see one need to be quite careful when stripping the loudspeaker wire - if you accidentally cut some of all the thin outer lying wires making up the cable all the high frequencies are lost in action or at least a big proportion of them 😁. I wonder what quality of cables are used inside the components.
For you grounding consider that 20KHz goes several meters deep in the typical dirt. This means that your system ground is very well connected to planet earth if you ground all your audio at one point. Grounding can reduce hum pickup. The filters required to meet FCC generally mean that your whole audio setup ends up at about 50V vs planet earth, In the days of tubes, this was hard to do on any sort of budget. Today, transistors are basically free. An engineer can throw 10 more of them at a design if needed and not increase the cost more than the cost of the power switch or volume knob.
"brighter" and many terms like that are very poorly defined. They are generally not well defined because in many cases the effect is pure imagination. Modern audio gear has a very flat gain and a near constant time delay over the audio band.
For low impedance a 4 wire braided cable works better than two twisted conductors. If you braid two red and two back #14 wires together then parallel the same color wires, you will get a lower impedance than with a twisted #12 pair. Ribbon cable can work to get a cable under a rug. With a 100 wire ribbon you can use every other vs the other every as a speaker connection.
Back in thr days of old, you walk into a state of the art recording studio you see a patch bay with these flimsy colored coded cables for everything.
The higher and lower frequencies need to be organised together onto tiny bus's so they arrive together on time.
Skin effect is much higher than 40khz on wire. However, with a high end transparent system there I found better sound with cable lifts above the floor. Perhaps the floor can cause change in inductance/capacitance on a cable as well. I encourage you test with your ears...
🤣🤣🤣 ... Oh wait... you weren't being serious, were you?
As they say you pays your money & takes your choice, I enjoy the sound from my silver interconnects,but I have never been convinced that a silver wired mains lead would make any difference.
I believe it was Dave Worrall, or perhaps another channel, that said "Nature is a low-pass filter" - and that applies to so much
What about those wide flat cables like 3" wide? Are they brighter?
This all really gets under MY skin...
You know what they say, "A Phill and his money are soon separated "
I'm not sure what point you're making by comparing the 0.8mm cable to the 3mm cable with 685 skin effect. 100% of a 0.8mm cable is 0.5mm^2, but the outer 68% of a 3mm cable is 6.3mm^2. So, even taking skin effect into account, the 3mm cable still has a much higher effective cross-section (i.e., much lower resistance) than the 0.8mm cable. (No, I'm not an audiophile. I can't hear anything. I haven't spent money on anything.)
Hey, with the new technological advances made theses days, maybe a speaker cable could be made using a crossover which would shunt the high frequencies to the center of a multi metal layered design whereby the center section has been made favorable for high frequencies. Wealthy audiophiles could rest then.
Audiophiles never rest.
The higher the frequency, the higher the resistance (impedance) from your speakers, so the skin effect is absolutely nothing to worry about in comparison.
As a silly comparison, say your speakers impedance rises to 100 Ohm, the skin effect would add 0.0001 Ohm on top of that.
I'm sure someone can come up with the correct numbers, (but still negligeable).
Already 40 years ago I read an article in an informative magazine... (for those old enough who know what that is). In the article they explained you can best use solid installation cable for your speakers, and nail them to your plinth about 10cm apart to avoid them working as a capacitor. I can't remember the arguments though, and I doubt I can tell the difference.
Capacitor in pF/nF range won't effect Audio Frequency. The problem is, Audio Snake oil seller sell Audio stuff with science for MHz and GHz Radio Frequency range. Gross Misappropriation !
Left out the t ,the skint effect after purchase.
Its the usual addressing the so called symptom whilst ignoring the real problem, imperfect Loudspeakers.
Sound doesn't travel through a cable.
For an entertaining read on the subject, find a copy of Allen Wright's "Supercables Cookbook". I have tried a recipe or two from this and they worked for me. As ever, your mileage may vary...
David Salz (WireWorld) speaks about its negative affect on sound
Forget silver plated copper, sounds bright, sounds gritty but transparency is better than pure copper.
Pure silver all the way.
As we know most current is carried on the skin. The way to resolve this is to use hollow conductors...... Like they do in electrical substations.....And some transmission lines.
And no - I am not joking. Look it up.
Hollow conductors save money on material. I'm sure the Hi-Fi manufacturers will be able to parlay it the other way and charge more for less as they will claim it is better! 🙂
I doubt any expensive woo woo line level, low impedance cable or silver fancy speaker cable would sound or scope any different then good grade low capacitance coaxial or good grade 10 or 14 gage copper wire, in a blindfold test. I remember wiring two speakers at a party, one channel cheap RadioShack 20 gauge and the other a 14 gauge camping extension cord 20 ft lengths.
The RadioShack side sounded like the tweeter was blown.
I scrounged around and found some expensive 14 gauge speaker wire, then used it to replace the twenty gauge stuff.
Funny thing, even switching the amp to mono, no one could hear the difference between the expense 14 gauge speaker wire or the camping 14 guage cord!
ElectroVoice has tables on what gauge to use for differing applications of speakers.
Short run wires, low volume efficient drivers 16 gauge may be sufficient.
Long run, 25 ft, loud inefficient driver between 10 to 14 gauge wire, probably is necessary.
If 14 guage copper just gets the job done, 10 won't improve it, and 16 gauge silver won't get it done.
Yes, skin effect is a thing.... like most disinformation, they latch onto a grain of irrelevant truth and twist it in order to manipulate us. I can remember from my days as a US Navy radar and radio technician, Skin effect is the reason we use waveguide for Radar signals, but not for Hf (3-30MHZ) Radio signals because it's negligible... irrelevant for signals that are 10 times the audible frequency, so the frequencies we can hear aren't even 1/10 as high as they would need to be for skin effect to matter.
i love the education
the skin effect is of interest to RF design. talking about it in audio engineering, despite being 'measurable' at a few kilohertz, is almost funny considering its minute effect.
How about multistranded cables?
I thought the video was almost over, then you mention it.
Oh yes, litz to litz jumping. Very big deal. Also, take into account the oxidization of non-OFC cable and how oxidization crystals create sort of resistors... I can only guess it's fun being so s*tupid as your average audiophile. We should dub it fore*skin-effect.
WC Fields said “A Sucker born everyday”
the only skineffect i have experienced in my 60 years of listening to audio have been the goosebumps i sometimes have experienced listening to certain artists or at very rare occations loudspeakers or a combo of both. 😀 in such cases there is only one solution : buy the damn thing and bring it home to marvel over.
You beet me, I was about to suggest Litz wire speaker cables.....
There has been a few designers who have gone down the multi-conductor channel, although stuffing it all up by adding heaps of capacitance in the process, This is a known source of amplifier instability - bad.
To me, the better route is to avoid low impedance speakers, 4ohms and below, so the resistance of the speaker wire has less effect. Or just get old like me, where age has a far greater effect on higher audio frequencies than skin effect ever will have.
I was advised that old age is bad for your health, don't go there.
If a multi strand cable is used, won’t the skin effect be less?
Only if each strand is separately insulated - enamal coated - which is the Litz wire he mentioned at the end. That is used in radio frequency electronics, but companies like Cardas offer it in audio cables. If the strands are all bare conductor, they act mostly like a single solid conductor. Unless they start to oxidize on the surface. If that happens, any cable begins to sound (and measure) badly.
As an engineer I can honestly say it's rare to hear such a load of cobblers spoken. If you are generating vast amounts of Kw from a generator then yep, possibly a problem.
Put it this way. The bigger the power output the bigger the cable used, not silver coating. The only place this is a problem is on hugh frequency EMF which has to be earthed on a generator and the simple solution is to use cheap flat braided earth bonding.
If you think you have a 'problem' feel the cable. Hot? No, it isn't thus the cable is perfectly suitable.
and it may use less depth ( skin effect ) but it uses more surface area which cancels this out as it still uses the same skin area effect .
and the more power the more it penetrates and the less power the less it penetrates . its resistaance in the wire building up as the flow increases higher currents consume more of the wire lesser currents consume lessof the wire and sliver and copper wouldnt tramsit the adio at a speed that would make any pesevable difference when it travels at the speed of light is a mans brain an oscilloscope ? no electric traveling around the world 8 times in 8 seconds with a 0.000001 speed differece will not be noticed. some people think they are the hearing Gods.
OCC = ❤
To avoid skin effect effecting my audio i wear a leather jacket and sit on a leather couch
The only skin effect that bothers me is the condition of what's covering my innards.
Only one thing to do to settle this. We must let Amir measure it. I do have a treasure trove of silver but mostly bars and coins. Alas, no silver speaker cables.
Amir hates Audiophiles, he has a huge following of audiophile haters. If you want REAL audio measurements and facts which inlcuding live testing so that even you can hear the difference, something which Amir doesn't do, then check out Alpha Audio.
some say aloe vera can bring some relief...
I spent $70 for 100 feet of pro speaker cable and I believe I heard a bit more dynamics in the tweeters over my previous cables which were lamp cords. HUGE improvements were made with mids and highs when I dialed in the woofer and subwoofer gain (50% lower). They had been muddy before hand.
You did this one wrong. This seems as if you're giving some credit to the whole nonsense. in first few seconds you might've said that skin-effect happens at lightning bolt levels such as a few MW and the story would end then and there.
Dałem łapkę w górę 👍
Serdecznie pozdrawiam.
Audiophiles believe so much bunk that is totally de-bunked by real science. The only real science at work that they totally ignore is PLACEBO effect. Somehow it doesn't effect "golden ears". Hi end audio is a gear collecting hobby, which is fine but ends up straying far from what matters to music or what actually affects what our ears can hear.
Exactly! Irrelevant. Got to love Audio mentally (Ph)ill. An audiophile spouting off about properties of a piece of gear that are totally irrelevant to, and have no effect on whatsoever in reproducing audio.
Oh crap, as if i isn’t enough and you have to haul out that J; it’s all down hill from here 😢 in exponential manner man
Human perception even at it's very best is pretty pitiable. The human abilities when it comes to self delusion are really amazing however.
No. Not bothered.
You really don’t like audiophiles.
The BIGGEST Problem of Audio-Piles ( not Audiophiles) is that, they suffer from massive Placebo effect / buyer remorse syndrome and supplement their Tech Hardware spending with evermore spending on these Snake-oil sellers, who sell these paraphernalia like obscenely costly cables, stands, isolator. YOU guys over engineer your listening gear, to the extent that they even surpass the spending on corresponding elements even on Recording studios.
The SKIN EFFECT on Audio Frequency Non-Linearity is exceedingly negligible, specially for 1-3 Meters of RCA/Speaker cables. So Please please please, keep these Horse Shit with you, Audio-Moses !!
-e^(i*pi)
Phil, you have too much disposable money.
Indeed the skin effect is real, but for normal, practical analogue audio interconnects the frequencies are too low for this to be a concern.
In any case, if audiophiles are really worried about this, both the DAC and amp should be _inside_ the speaker, and the connection between the source and speaker should be digital. That way the overall analogue cabling can be kept the shortest.
The skin effect is real but in terms of audio perceptible to the human ear, it's utter bunk. There's no way that the skin effect is causing an appreciable fall off in frequency response. There's not a chance that there is even 1 dB of difference. Chasing after cables to mitigate the effect is simply another way to waste money.
I beg to differ - They are not wasting money, they are making generous and voluntary charitable donations to R&D labs the world over, thus allowing the rest of us to obtain better equipment at a more reasonable price point. I think we owe them a bit of gratitude!
(/s, of course).
I build speakers with FR driver and added woofer and use acrossover filter for the FR driver. I found that my steel alligator clip cables sound different to my standard copper cable. I used the steel alligator cables for trial&error connection. But after discovering that they sound different, I no longer use them. I now use cut off bits of my copper wire (without the alligator clips) for trail&error. Less convenient but way more accurate. So cables would have to make a difference. The difference in my case was so great that I had to change a resistor when I changed to my copper wire (after usinging the steel cables) on the crossover.
Oddly enough I was just discussing this with a friend (also a RUclips audio channel presenter) in the last two days.
I did calculations and determined that with the wire being used for some interconnects we were contemplating, the skin effect should have no effects of any reasonable concern until at least somewhere well above 260-300khz.
As neither of us are bats (last time we checked anyway), we laughed it off and carried on. 🤣
I am really impressed with Audio Phil's cable. All that that titanium and nitrogen and everything else. Absolutely top notch! 😀😀
Don't forget the nano tubes!
@@CaptainZuurpruim ...the Vanta Black Nano tubes no less - we wouldn't want them to 'colour' the sound 🙂
Audio Phil sounds like the kind of guy who has a six figure system that generates a showroom side with severely lit up upper mids, which is only suitable to maximum 10 minute listening sessions and even then only with pristine recordings. :)
You’re confirming what many electrical engineers have told me over the years. Good channel!!
I’m an electrical engineer and I thought this video was gonna be mocking audiophiles for obsessing over differences you wouldn’t actually be able to perceive, but I guess not 😅
If you think you can actually hear "skin effect" you are no engineer.
At Best ... it might, maybe, show up on laboratory quality test equipment.
I would do a test on different cables but my Vector Network Analyser only goes down to 50kHz so any results would be meaningless.
@@MrBanzoid
That and ... so many "knowledgeable" people have written about this that nobody can actually find the truth anymore.
Very simply: Audio cables are NOT feedlines. All this talk about stuff that only matters at radio frequencies is just bunk.
Nothing personal but let me be blunt. This was very interesting but a waste of time, if people think that skin effect has any effect on audio then they are crazy, let them waste their money. they are morons. Bottom line skin effect has no place in a conversation in audio, now you want to talk about microwave and wave guides then we can talk skin effect.
Audio Phil just got his Pay check from Snake Oil sellers to fortify the Myth of Audio-Retards ...
I have a pair of RCA cables made of Litz wire which I made about 40 years ago. I know where they are, but it has been decades since I’ve used them, because I now know what I’m doing and I’m sure it doesn’t make any difference.
Do people who worry about such minutiae actually listen too and enjoy music or are they listening for the myriad of things that MAY go wrong? 😃
No true audiophile worries about skin effect because they know it's far too small to be significant.
where is the list and requirements to be a "true audiophile?
@@antonio.x22 first requirement is to have a brain and don't be a dick.
"Hearing" the effects of the skin effect at such a low frequency with one's vastly imperfect pressure-to-neuronal activity transducers (ears they call'em) is on par with delusions during a manic episode. It's also an alarm to see a shrink asap, with the possibility of remaining there for treatment…
Anyone who thinks their domestic audio interconnects must vastly exceed the quality and expense of a typical studio microphone cable forgets that the latter is unavoidably part of their signal chain.
Along with hundreds of opamps. Oh noo! 😂
Two points; at 6:10 where you discuss the effect at 20KHz, being the skin depth is 68% of your conductor. Although noted, it's good to remember that this point isn't a "brick wall", it's the point where 63% of the current is carried, the remaining 37% of current is still below this depth. The effect is therefore less than expected. The other, is the topic of surface roughness, where "how smooth" the conductor surface matters. The roughness alters the the impedance for high frequency signals traveling at the very edge of the conductor. Whilst really a concern on PCB traces, it does have a measurable effect on in co-ax cable. Certainly in the >40GHz range, but that little frequency-detail won't bother the serious audiophile. I give to Audio Phil conductor surface roughness as a new audiophile toy. :- ) And yes, I literally have in the past polished PCB traces….but that’s a RF story.
Bum, thats two things for Phil now....
Becarefull with Audio Phile because he speaks so audiophily that you comments will be flooded with question "where to buy ?" 🤣
😂😂
And here you have the reason I've been telling people that thinner cables are better for interconnects. It's painfully simple... at audio frequencies the skin depth in copper is greater than the diameter of the wire... so the whole thing is used.
The same is true for speaker wires... at 30khz the skin depth is like 95% of a 16ga lamp cord and since it is stranded wire, this depth is greater than each strand, so eddy currents are greatly reduced and you're only messing with 0.004 ohms of resistance per foot.
Now if you want a REAL reason not to use horse-dong sized wires, consider that *surface area* is a grand multiplier of the cable's potential to pick up stray signals. Take any antenna and double it's diameter and watch what happens to your signal strength meter... bigger wires make better antennas.
But hey... I'm just a lowly technician, what could I possibly know....
Nicely put...Bravo !
@@andymouse
Gee, thanks!
I only worry about skin effect at RF levels where I use silver plated wire, Belden quote that 22 AWG wire has no skin effect at 20kHz
But but but...the ultimate in "fidelityness" can ONLY be obtained through cables as thick as a python! Because they are expensive and hi-fi magazines said so! :P
I think one should definitely be concerned about the copper cables and PCB's used in audio production. After that we can obsess about the 50 or so dirty opamp sections used in music production electronics...
as Frank Perdue so eloquently stated, "If you can develop a preference among dead chickens, you can do it for anything."
Guitar cables are subjected to an effect that can seem similar to the skin effect if the cable becomes several meters long, and you will then hear a clear decrease in brightness, a good countermeasure to this problem is to plug it through a buffer that converts the signal from high impedance to low impedance, and it will be capable of retaining those frequencies through said cable. By the same logic I would think active pickups would completely remedy this problem before even reaching the cable.
the reason guitar cables are subject to this problem is because its core and shielding together can act like a capacitor, driving those higher frequencies to ground.
Considering a buffer can retain the quality of a signal across a long capacitor I would claim that an "audiophile grade" power/pre amplifier should be able to retain the quality of a signal though a regular copper cable without any audible issues at all
That isn't skin effect
@@kevingest5452
yea its not. the skin effect is an inductive effect.
The guitar cable is a capacitive effect created between the cable's shielding and its core, leaking higher frequencies to ground, thus dulling the sound before reaching the amp.
The reason I said they can seem similar is because they both result in loss of high frequencies proportional to its cable length.
the guitar cable is just way worse
The late great Roger Russell of McIntosh talked about speaker cables and the rending of garments, the wailing and gnashing of teeth over speaker cables. He recommended 18 gauge wire because the extra resistance helped with damping factor.
Comment readers might like to explore further at www.roger-russell.com/wire.htm