Audio problems are like rabbits—solve one, and two more pop up.
A few days ago, we were going on about balanced interconnects and why we don't need balanced speaker cables: the longer the RCA single-ended interconnects, the more prone to hums, buzzes, and nastiness riding along with your music. Balanced cables—borrowed from the pro audio world—solve this beautifully. By using two signal lines and a ground, and rejecting anything common to both, balanced cables gave us quiet, long runs.
Problem solved.
But something else happened. With noise off the table, we were finally free to move our power amps closer to the loudspeakers and extend the interconnects from the source or preamp instead. And that seemingly minor relocation changes everything.
It allows us to have shorter speaker cables and longer interconnects.
Speaker cables struggle with cable length—not because of noise—but different gremalins like impedance, inductance, and resistance. The longer the speaker cable, the greater the losses and the greater the chances you'll start to hear the cable more than the music.
Short speaker cables, on the other hand, sound better. Not because of any difference in noise, but because the amplifier has better control over the speaker when the cable’s out of the way.
So by solving the problem of interconnect noise with balanced lines, we incidentally solved the speaker cable problem too. We flipped the setup: long interconnects (now quiet) and short speaker cables (now better sounding). One problem’s solution opened the door to another improvement we didn’t even think was related.
Funny how one door opens another.
