In this series, we’ve discussed the basics of audio cable design (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3), RCA and XLR interconnect design, and now we look at speaker cables.

These are a very different animal than high input-impedance interconnecting cables. A speaker cable connects to an extremely inconsistent 2 to 32 ohm (or even lower and higher!) reactive load created by the speaker. RCA and XLR interconnect cables see a much more consistent and resistive load, making their electrical measurements far easier to predict.

While speaker cable also suffers from the non-linearity of the velocity of propagation in the audio band, it has an additional challenge. It has to be lower in impedance to better match the speaker load, but when the velocity of propagation is going down, this naturally increases the cable’s impedance.

This article comes from psaudio edit released