What would be a great way to figure out what cables we need.

[RichDavis]

Andromedaaudio,

IMHO it does not seem a good recipe. The internal wire used to connect the speakers to the crossover has much less ambitious and very different requirements than the wire connecting the amplifier to the speaker. Unless you are a believer that all decent cables sound the same, nothing else can support this position.

Philip Newell of Acoustic Design wrote an article on cables in Hifi Critic about this specific aspect some years ago. At less one member of WBF would be very happy with his solution to this problem - going active!

I think you'll find situations that will support both sides. I don't know if there is a hard and fast rule to this. Yes, there are considerations one must be careful during the selection process.

I went active on my last purchase, but it was more because it was for a smaller home office system and I quite frankly wanted something as simple as possible, but it did limit my choices considerably. I am not considering upgrading my system and was looking at active speakers, but I'm actually looking at the AIO electronics approach and then just selecting the passive speakers that fit my needs. I'm finding for smaller rooms where we simply don't have the room or need to buy separates, the AIO electronics is a good method and it's just figuring out the speaker cable and speakers that work well. Since monitor speakers have VERY short cable lengths, it may not be as critical with internal wiring as it might for larger speakers.

In the case where it might make sense to buy the same brand of cables that are being used internally, Wilson Audio comes to mind. I run into a lot of Wilson speaker owners that go with MIT/Transparent cables (depending on which cables are used) and that's what SOME have decided. Right or wrong, it's their method of choosing. In the case of Spectral Audio, they had cables specifically made for their products, and that's what people tend to use and that's how the products were designed. Again, nothing wrong with that approach either. Some brands simply use more generic internal wiring and in those cases, just selecting the cables you like is all that's required. So, I don't know if one method always works best. I guess it's up to the person what they feel most comfortable with, but in some cases, it might make sense to at least try the same mfg of cables as what is used internally. I see various brands being used (Kimber, MIT, Transparent, etc.), one also is wise to ask the electronics mfg and speaker mfg if different what their recommendations are since they typically use one or a small number of cables to test their products with during the design stage since they can't test every combination. but I do see more and more companies offering their own line of cables for their products.

 

[andromedaaudio]

The so called great amp - cable matches or whatever match mentioned , are quite often business matches iow the distributor/dealer is marketing his own productline
" The amp that fries the cable , sounds to me some importer - dealer are having a business disagreement

Well, here's some information on that approach.

I think it's an approach that does have some merit to it. Speaker mfg do design their products with certain cable internally. So, it many times would seem to make the logical sense. However, there are projects that I've read about where someone actually requested a DIFFERENT cable than what the speaker mfg normally uses and they did it with better results than the original which had less expensive, more generic cables. So in that case, they switched the internal cables to ones that they preferred vs the cables that normally are wired.

Every cable mfg has their own approach to making cables and they'll all sound slightly differently, some differences can be minimal and some can be quite drastic and that depends on the system and one's ability to hear. But if you have a lot of experience in cables, then you might have a favorite brand and maybe you can request the speaker mfg to re-wire using the brand you like, or have someone (or yourself) re-wire the speaker yourself (once the warranty is over). But some of these power amps out there actually don't work well with certain cables. I read an article on someone reviewing one brand power amp, and just before they were about to use a certain brand cable, the mfg called them up and told them NOT to use that cable because of capacitance reasons and the amp make actually fry the cable. I thought that was a little amusing.

Anyway, I agree that that might be a great choice is use what the mfg uses. It makes sense.