Potential LONG speaker cable run -- should I give up?

Bart001

Bart001

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When designing our new home I had the builder and electrician build in flexible conduits to permit in-wall location of speaker cables.

Well when now all is done, it's 40' of in-wall conduit for the left channel, 30' for the right. Plus distance from amp to wall plate, and from each speaker to their wall plates. So almost 60 feet per channel!

Given the decent current draw of my A3's (driven by the Naim flagship NAP 500), should I just be giving up on getting the right level of performance with cables that long? They'll be quite a bit shorter if just laid on the floor as usual.

And if I do want them in the walls -- which cables? Price obviously is a factor. Im not really interested in $15,000 - $25,000 investment. I can buy a lot of LP's for that money!!
 
I would stick with a shorter run of SuperLumina speaker cables. They are quite thin anyway. 3-5m.

Bart, is your 500 the “DR”?

Congrats on the new home!
 
It is indeed a “DR” version. Awesome system!

From reading the Naim forums, 5-7M (closer to 5M) runs of speaker cables seems to be optimal, properly dressed of course.
 
Bart001 said:
When designing our new home I had the builder and electrician build in flexible conduits to permit in-wall location of speaker cables.

Well when now all is done, it's 40' of in-wall conduit for the left channel, 30' for the right. Plus distance from amp to wall plate, and from each speaker to their wall plates. So almost 60 feet per channel!

Given the decent current draw of my A3's (driven by the Naim flagship NAP 500), should I just be giving up on getting the right level of performance with cables that long? They'll be quite a bit shorter if just laid on the floor as usual.

And if I do want them in the walls -- which cables? Price obviously is a factor. Im not really interested in $15,000 - $25,000 investment. I can buy a lot of LP's for that money!!
Click to expand...

I have built-in speaker cables in my walls, yet, I ended up not using them.
Instead I had a custom-made carpet for the room and run the cables under the carpet.

(In my case, the cables are interconnects from the preamp to the amps. The amps are next to the speaker so each speaker cable is less than 3’ long).

A friend of mine had a listening room built. It was at ground level. He knew where the equipment was going to be located (equipment rack along side wall; speakers next to front wall). He had a 3 inch conduits built into the foundation slab (not into the walls). The conduit exited from the floor next to where speakers were located. That way, he has shorter runs (as compared to in-wall runs) and no need for wall plates.
 
nicoff said:
I have built-in speaker cables in my walls, yet, I ended up not using them.
Click to expand...

Me too. But I stopped using it because I noticed that there was a clear loss of sound quality.
It looks like cables need air around!
 
Bart001 said:
Well when now all is done, it's 40' of in-wall conduit for the left channel, 30' for the right. Plus distance from amp to wall plate, and from each speaker to their wall plates. So almost 60 feet per channel!

Given the decent current draw of my A3's (driven by the Naim flagship NAP 500), should I just be giving up on getting the right level of performance with cables that long? They'll be quite a bit shorter if just laid on the floor as usual.

And if I do want them in the walls -- which cables? Price obviously is a factor.
Click to expand...

At 60', I think you might want the speaker cables to be an effective 6-7 awg given the Magico A3's minimum impedance. While technically possible, by purchasing in-wall speaker cables and maybe quadrupling or octupling them up to drop 3 awg at each doubling of the wires, the wall plate connectors and conduit diameter might make that infeasible.

If you do want to try this, you can get something like Belden BL-5100UP bulk in-wall speaker cable from someone like Markertek.

Alternatively, you can run balanced audio cabling through your conduit, with XLR connectors on the wall plates, and then place the NAP 500 DR at the speaker end. 60' of line-level balanced audio will be fine, and then you can use a relatively short run of speaker cables.
 
I think in-wall cables are something for people running Beolab systems and such [emoji3].

The cost of good speaker cables just renders that model unfeasible. My speaker cables cost €4000,- for 2 x 2 m. And while good, they’re nothing outrageously expensive. I also think what Spock pointed out to be true, electrical load/ conductance and hence sound will change when inside the wall.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Just to close the loop I did give up on the in-wall solution. Will just use Naim's cables, on the floor, as intended :)
 
I used Transparent cable for runs over 100ft to ceiling speakers in 12 different locations in the house. The music played on in all its glory. I used Transparent in my theater room with runs over 40 ft from D’Agostino momentum mono center amp to Wilson Mezzo and then Polaris center channel. The music played on and careful listening to test tones revealed no audible difference to L and R 8 ft cables with same amps parked next to speakers in the theater room. The music played on as it always does. We tend to way over complicate things with no proof and often chose to ignore the obvious.
 
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