ICEpower 1200 FAQ How to make perfect speaker cable tutorial
how to make a perfect speaker cable and tutorial how to make a perfect speaker cable by yourself and we will cover Advanced scenario how to make a multi-channel speaker cable before we start to build something we need to understand the theoretical Basics what does it mean good speaker cable here I took picture from ice power engineering manual uh where they made the recommendations for speaker cable and you can see the two separate White s are bad and we need to understand why then two separate cables closed to each other is much better but still not perfect and this is typical budget solution you may find plenty of cables where two cables are put together and uh with a significant cross-section and sold as a as a speaker cables two Twisted cables are excellent and two cables in a shield also are excellent but the key question why why this one is very bad this is kind of okay and those two are excellent so let's cover some theoretical electromagnetic propagation principles and here is our scenario and the first one when you have two separate cables uh this is single wire scenario and you can see single wire when current is flowing through the single wire you are generating significant electromagnetic field but you have two wires at close proximity you have bet scenario because the current flowing through the one wire is generating electromagnetic field in One Direction and the minus or current when is Flowing in opposite direction it is generating opposite electromagnetic field and when your cables are twisted there is a kind of mismatch here nothing to compensate there is partly compensated and then you have a continuous continuous electromagnet magnetic field Direction changes and it compensate each other here is magnetometer which is measuring some impact or radiated electromagnetic noise and you can see single wire emission is huge is huge then two wires it's double lower and when you have a twisted wire uh emission is very low and actually key reason why you should twist your speaker cables are electromagnetic compatibility all amplifiers has a high current and if they have some artifacts or or whatever they have you are emitting significant noise around and it is uh receiv it by your uh your audio equipment also it's valid that uh when you have a single wire it is receiving receiving a lot of interference and noise from uh electrical appliances and in a worst case scenario where you are close to some radio transmitter or or even 5G transmitter all those electromagnetic uh noises are generating field or generating current in your in your wire so when we twist it we are gaining additional benefit we are gaining that benefit that it is noise resilient but thej reason why you should twist is that you and your amplifier is not generating noise in environment uh one more side effect from a twisted wire when you put two wires uh uh just flat they are not staying flat and when you twist wires they are staying flat to the surface um the same picture you can see current is going in in in One Direction and going back and it's radiate electromagnetic transmission electromagnetic field creates and when you you twisted a total mismatch in both directions and your emission is a minimalistic so the key reason why you should twist wires is electromagnetic compatibility uh one more thing to understand about your uh inputs about your electronic equipment that um there are two type of uh uh input circuits one is unbalanced and in consumer uh grade devices mostly we have unbalanced unbalanced uh uh interconnections are made in a way that you have a hot wire where you have a signal and then you have a ground and you have a uh this uh hot wire reference to the ground and here is your precious signal and then you have a length of uh of cable and then noise from other equipment are coming to that uh uh hot wire and then both are coming to amplify amplifi amplifi so then you have signal plus noise no I would say that uh for Consumer grade equipment uh uh unbalanced connection interconnection you can go between uh 3 to 6 M no more so this is limit otherwise you are receiving more and more noise another scenario Us in professional audio equipment uh it's a balanced inputs or balanced signal and you have two hot wires and those hot wires are not referen to the ground ground is only uh interconnecting your chassi and making far de cage to reduce the noise even more artificially on a positive wire we are generating positive phase signal and on a on a negative uh conductor we are creating opposite polarity signal reverse polarity signal and then we have a summing Amplified one is with a with one input is positive one input is negative and then when and uh when you summing plus signal and minus means reverse you are getting double amplitude out in the same time through the propagation path you are receiving noise but received noise is in the same polarity and here on the summing amplifier they subtract each other and the good summing amplifiers can do some 20,000 times noise subtraction and you have for example here super noisy signal but output will be perfectly clean um mainstream amplifiers suming amplifiers has ratio about thousand times not at least 100 but normal ones about a thousand times you reduce the noise and this is very noise resilient uh pattern Balan and inputs are much better than unbalanced and you can go for for 10 20 100 600 M for amplifier interconnection even with a microphone signal you can go for 20 30 m and here we are talking about a molt and here I took one example how it applies to uh audio amplifiers you can see the same picture what we discussed before and imagine if you make connections here to the speaker in one side and from the other wire to other side we have the same schema and here our loudspeaker is working as a passive summing amplifier and when we get such kind of scenario when we have two wires uh with a with opposite signal it is bridged audio amplifier and for example ice power 1,200 and uh 2000 I2 amplifiers uh those are bridged by design precisely bridged they have four separate amplifiers on board and then they Bridge it and then you have a perfect noise resilient solution actually those ice power 1,200 amplifiers has a very low noise and also um if amplifier generates some harmonics then those harmonics are second harmonic is compensated also on a on on a load this is so-called quadr balanced architecture introduced by McIntosh but in this board it is built by Design I really like this board and Engineers did maximum possible to make it absolutely great in my opinion uh this Amplified is endgame Amplified there's no shortcuts at any design aspect it is fully integrated it has sufficient power it has this Quadro Balan designed has a lot of Serv things and for a home users it's really endgame amplifier so the first characteristic of a good speaker cable is noise resilience when we test it we are there the second one is resistance and you know that uh speaker wire resistance is function from the distance here I took example as a good speaker impedance so this is impedance what to your amplifier sense it's not just a flat 4 Ohms you can see there is a the hills and mountains and downhills and this particular speaker uh has a lower lower uh speaker impedance of uh of 5.5 ohms this is 8 ohm speaker and this is a great 8 ohm speaker a welld designed crossover and here I took another example a bad speaker you can see this also is at speaker have those Rena ances as it is uh with a crossover but here uh you have a bad crossover design and you have a huge dip here on a 2.5 KZ and it's uh falling down to three ohms and sometimes you don't understand why your amplifier is getting hot or or even PRS protection this is due to the bad crossover design how this speaker impedance uh uh is connected to speaker wires and um you should look at your uh system as a resistive divider so you have your amplifier here and amplifier is a constant voltage uh uh equivalent uh schema that means if we put uh 10 volts output on Amplified it keeps those 10 volts uh despite of any uh change of of load most of amplifiers are measured on resistive load but in real life scenario you have this uh uh crossover and crossover has impedance impedance is not resistive it's uh really complex then you have those uh uh hills and mountains and drops everything actually knowing uh that uh speaker impedance uh you can calculate each frequence what will be uh voltage on a on a loudspeaker and then you have some amplitude frequency variations uh rule of thumb is that this R1 or wire resistance should be 10 times lower than your speaker lowest impedance no once you have a 4 ohm loudspeaker then it should be4 ohms or less when you have very bad speak bad speaker then it it should go even even lower and here I took a calculation uh for a 10 m long uh long wire with a different copper wire with a different crosssections and uh the first one uh at a 1 square mm copper wire uh you are getting 02 ohms so that means the normal amplifier minimum minimum cross-section wire for a 10 m distance uh should be uh at least one square mm in professional industry smallest uh crosssection is 1.5 Square mm and then you get a
0.1 ohm resistance on a on a 10 m and if you are want to go for some EXT than 2.5 is is a second standard in professional industry and then you get U 0.067 ohms wi resistance on a on a 10 m 10 m is Extreme typically we have about 6 7 m at home and what conclusions we can make that minimum cross-section should be one square mm if you want some Reserve you can go for 1.5 uh Square mm
uh but often if you have shorter distance no for example 5 m or 3 m um this value will drop uh also by factor of three do you need a finger thick uh speaker wires no you don't you can see even for 10 m and 2.5 Square me Square mm wire is giving a fantastic result fantastic result I think it's a Max what you need for a home usage how about active speaker systems uh for active speaker systems you have a crossover uh before audio amplifier and uh using uh uh multi- amplifier connections so uh for a mid-range what typically goes from I don't know from 300 no let's say to 400 maybe 500 uh you have very flat impedance you can use thin wires that will not influence your upload frequency characteristics and uh this is one of uh reasons why you get so good results also with a with a multi- amplifier uh Solutions or active speaker solution that uh your impedance is perfect comparing to passive crossover okay we covered some the theoretical Basics and let's build multi chel speaker cable we also want it easy to use and have the same user experience as dealing with a single Channel speaker cable so here I have have my cables uh I was looking for a 60 volts cable because it has a thin installation I didn't found it so I'm using uh 220 volt cables uh here I made adapter to secure wires yeah you can see very simple adapter so when you secure wires then you use a cordless drill and twist it first you twist each uh wire separately twist it gently and then uh put every everything together and twist it to the final after that I put nylon protective cover uh to them and then let's secure connectors so you can see it stays flat it doesn't make any uh wrinkles or rings and this is really a good way how to make a cable afterwards it stay flat to the surface as well even even thick wires are twisted together the final step is uh attach connectors here I took two new connectors this is a package how they come and here is a pin speak and connector uh it consist from four parts so and also we have some copper tubes or other metal Co metal tubes uh to cream on wi if we have a crimping tool but it's not must to use it I have it and I will crimp but I will Crim uh some some mening electrical uh connectors this is much easier when you finish your wires will not be the same length but easy to fix just put them together and cut all of them at once even don't try to make them equal it's not possible now we need to clean it I'll show you it in accelerate mode uh but simple procedure any wi striper will fit well uh you it's not necessary to even even uh crimp those extra connectors you can just uh make those wires longer and uh it's fine uh to secure with the screws I have option to crimp it and I like those terminals I will crimp it but it is not must if you don't have it don't worry simply use what you have now connection will be great anyway for woler I need a double size and I pick it from my stock actually those crimping uh tools are not uh not expensive I bought them at uh AliExpress and I think the price was about 2020 the quality is good and uh you can really uh have that uh excellent uh wire processing otherwise uh you need a thin wires or even solder wires but once you make this crimping type uh it is really secure and also when those screw terminal those screws come in and those tubes are uh elastic uh and you have crazy strong connection afterwards uh so I think it's a relatively reliable technology and also this plastic small plastic cover also adds additional security when you assembling such type of devices I'm I'm kind of fan okay now let's put everything together uh some part but you should be cautious and put put first uh if you forget then you should redo it uh uh again but uh otherwise it's straightforward process uh pay attention there is a mark for a contact number one and then you go counter clockwise looking from uh the terminal side and in in general item by it and we can do it uh pretty smooth pretty smooth you can see here is accelerate mode I try to to speak and then show in the same time no way so I'm doing this kind of voice over then it's uh by far better but uh anyway streamline or seamless seamless process and I'm pretty happy how it is went through and here you can see here is a uh first contact Mark it is a one plus and you start with one plus and go counter clockwise and you will not uh make mistakes for my project or for this particular cable I will use just a sticky tape and it is secure and reliable enough if you want to something uh nicer nice looking then you can use a shrinking tubes and uh or or other other material I saw even some uh Advanced cables they using aluminium uh kind of uh Clump at the end uh but it's pretty secure using a sticky tape yeah yeah we can talk about Aesthetics but uh sometimes I'm building for myself in this case it's not important uh when I'm plan to to sell something probably I will put a shrinking tube and and then it will look more professional from practical application it's not needed but you know sometimes we need Aesthetics especially I know selling in Japan in in in Germany people are obsessed with with a nice nice looking things and maybe it's right sometimes we need it uh so now you can see that they there are kind of uh key locks and we should uh uh we should place them properly some of them are larger some of them are smaller so you can't make make mistake and when you place it then it goes only in one um one position um this uh uh clumping you um it is made pretty pretty smart so um you can put it afterwards uh you shouldn't put it on a cable in advance and then uh just securing with that uh key lock and our our connector is done when you put everything together it will be really secure it clumps those wires as a hell they are very strong in a in a contact and uh and uh you can be no kind of secure even if uh someone will push it or pull it no problem at all and you can see pretty easy to make it and afterwards you have really fast removable removable uh speaker cables uh your speakers will be perfectly or absolutely passive No Electronic there and uh multi- Channel amplifi connected with just a one special cable yeah nice nice nice I'm pretty happy with the result uh now let's check uh how they fit in panel Mount connector there are key locks and you can see how easy is to connect and it's really strong and straightforward it's easy to manage easy to move it uh easy to place your speakers I think it's uh it's a perfect solution for for a future dii projects yes we can use banana type of speaker connectors but those are not good in my opinion
2025-03-15 12:27
