How important is it to use expensive, high quality interconnections and speaker cable in a middle range stereo system (%A3300 amp, %A3500 speakers and %A3200 CD player) and how much should i spend on each ?

Gnomon

It is important to use heavy duty cables to high-powered speakers. Stereo system use high current at low voltage (a 100 watt speaker at 8 Ohms draws a current of 3.5 Amps). These high currents will cause problems if you put them though flimsy cables. But providing your cables are thick enough, just about anything is good enough. These cable systems costing hundreds of pounds are a complete waste of money. Apr 05 02, 7:43 AM

eliasen

Gnomon, I agree. Lots of people get taken for lots of money by silly claims about stereos. We did analysis of this when we were in college (Electrical Engineering). It became quite clear that a thin, cheap piece of speaker wire was just fine, quite possibly better. With a small wire, resistance is the most important factor. You may just lose a bit of power in the wire but a signal isn't distorted by pure resistance, just made quieter at all frequencies. Just turn up the volume by 1% and it's the same signal. Now, some of these gigantic wires have much higher amounts of capacitance and inductance. (Larger *always* gives more {capacitance;} there's no way around it.) These *WILL* distort different frequencies at different levels. Capacitance will choke off low {frequencies;} inductance will choke off higher frequencies. When different frequencies are cut off differently, it causes distortion. Distortion can't be eliminated by simple volume adjustments. For your interconnects, just get ordinary shielded cable. My recommendation is that you invest the money in an {equalizer;} this helps to match the sound to your room, and the frequency responses of your speakers, and the signal emitted by your amplifier, none of which will be level to start with. It's the single most important part of matching all of your components. Audio companies should be forced to validate their outrageous claims in double-blind experiments. Or, you could do a double-blind test yourself! Buy just one or two monster cables (hopefully you can return them,) and some cheap wire to compare it to. Get two friends to help you. Have one friend secretly and randomly attach one of the wires to the stereo. Let him set the volume randomly. Then have him leave the room. You now enter the {room;} listen to the stereo without peeking at the wire and write your impressions, maybe on a scale of 1 to 100. You can fiddle with the volume if you want, but it's probably best if you just rate the *quality* of the sound. Repeat this a bunch of times. Make sure that the first friend writes down the settings for each trial! Now, have the third person (who doesn't know what the settings are) evaluate your notes to determine which impressions you ranked as 'better.' After he's done that, compare that to the list of which wires were connected at which time. I'll bet anything that you can't tell the difference, and that if you do enough trials, your samples will be random. But who cares what I think? You can prove it to yourself! Gotta love the scientific method! Apr 05 02, 8:19 AM