Knowledge is pain, uncertainty is even greater pain when you know enough - a jarring whirl.
Now that I have Iconoclast speaker cables that provably offer a great advantage to the coherency of arrival of signal frequencies across the audible range, I am constantly reminded of the very disadvantage that my speakers’ internal wiring offer after the fact. An extreme uncertainty of how much value am I getting from Iconoclast speaker cables after all. Only replacing the internal wire with Iconoclast, with insane cost, would give assuring certainty.
I know, it’s additive when it comes to these losses and gains. No, just losses?
But the internal wiring does present significant length, running through even smallish 1m high floorstanders - it’s like 1/5 of the length from amp to speaker, with 3m SCs. I wonder if “additive” loss is linear in nature or could it be that the Iconoclast’s propagation velocity coherence benefit is exponentially lost through even 1/5 length of standard wire.
I’m now considering full-range drivers so I can solder the Iconoclast straight to the drivers…
Not Iconoclast by any stretch but I wonder the same thing when I see the meaty 6’ cables running from amp to speaker and then to 16 ish gauge wires wires on full display from cross over box to drivers in my 40” tall OB speakers.
Sure. The music does sound enjoyable, some of the time at least.
But do I have what I thought I would be having when buying the Iconoclast speaker cables? At the time I somehow thought the crossover is something to be driven as a discrete entity and it’s care-free when it comes to the signal’s propagation velocity as long as it’s coherent up the terminals. How I could think that, dunno, maybe the closed-box thematics of crossovers in general manipulated me into not thinking inside the box.
A good part of how the structure of an Iconoclast SC transmits coherent audio signal is… a very certain coherent structure, unsurprisingly. Imagine this: 6ft of Iconoclast SC, 3ft of internal “standard wire” (no matter if it’s 7N silver, it’s here a stranded or solid core single conductor type).
When the signal leaves the amplifier’s terminals, it is coherent in phase across frequencies (hopefully) - the Iconoclast cable will not ruin that, it will keep the arrivals of differing frequency wavefronts fairly cohesive to the speaker terminals. From then on let’s disregard the crossover as ideal in this regard and concentrate on the point that what the driver sees is 3ft of speaker cable that does not hold good cohesion over audible frequencies’ propagation velocities. If we had a straight run from amp to a full-range driver, this scenario can now be compared to either having the standard cable used or the Iconoclast used. Which might I pick… This just in terms of what the actual sound-reproducing driver “sees”
Better ditch expensive cabling and minimize loss by welding monoblocks’ outputs to drivers. Not backs of speakers unless open baffle used, but actually position the monoblocks such that their outputs lick the heels of the drivers.
Possibly (?) not the best, but a noticeable change in sound from what I have heard from Ze’ev, the PAP speaker designer. In general PAP open baffle speakers are intended to accommodate all sorts of modifications so the owner may tailor the sound. For the most part I run my PAP Trio 15 Classics as original. wiring upgrades are an easy upgrade as are changes to the crossover. A nice change I did make was replacing the stock feet with the Gaia II footers, which solidified the bass, and opened up the mid-bass and lower midrange.
Why doubt internal wiring of your speakers when those speakers are voiced with that wiring? Buy new speakers if you do not like the sound.Replacing internal wiring potentially makes things worse.
Iconoclast cabling can technically speaking make the signal chain better than honestly most even high tech applications, but as Galen has said, there are other, as quoted, “Ferrari” type cabling for considerable cost that can still compete. Anyway, if wiring a speaker with better cabling makes the tuning worse, that’s either a time to change speakers, or modify them. Harmonically tuning a system to taste is a tweaky matter…
Rudolph: I do not believe you are familiar with Pure Audio Project speakers or their philosophy. To a degree they are intended to be tweaked to adjust voicing based on your preferences, the room, and electronics in play.
I am of the belief that for Iconoclast, their “sound” is more “true” in the frequency phase aspect that I consider it closer to an ideal perfect neutrality than many other cable candidates that might have other virtues.
The material of Iconoclast cable is obviously the leading factor for change in their “sound”.
Now, imagine a premium, silver-plated OCC copper Iconoclast speaker cable! That would be ever more costly but I don’t see why not perhaps again clearly different nature in tonality that would be interesting to sample against the other metal variants.
Actually, in an ideal world where I was rich enough to afford idealism’s materialization, I would demand a pair of gold-plated OCC silver Iconoclast speaker cables to be manufactured specially, whatever it’d pay to produce.
The owner sure said that it did.