[accentstryping]

Whats better for a 25-30' run to the rears, long ic's or long speaker cables?
                                                                     MM

[ajzepp]

I don't know if you've heard of Mapleshade Records, but I'm a big fan of theirs. Pierre, the owner, LOVES music and everything that has to do with the advancement of its reproduction. Anyway, he strongly recommends shorter interconnects and longer speaker cables. In fact, he goes so far as to say that speaker cables that are any shorter than 8' don't sound as good as those that are 8' or longer. Take that for what it's worth, I'm not trying to revisit the debate on speaker cables....but if you read some reviews on the Mapleshade stuff, they are consistently positive. If Pierre says something works, I tend to believe him.

I'm actually in a bind cause longer ICs would actually work better for what I want to do, but I'm thinking I'll just find an alternate way to rig everything up instead. But anyway, if you go to that site and look around (www.mapleshaderecords.com), you might find some really interesting ideas. I know I have!

[Digi-G]

Experience tells me that short interconnects and long speaker cables are the way to go.

In one of my surround setups I had a 2 channel amp that was used exclusively for the rear speakers.  I thought it would be a great idea to move it to the back of the room so it was closer to the speakers (i.e. shorter speaker runs).  I was amazed at how much noise was introduced into the system with this setup.  The interconnects (which were carrying low level signals) seemed to be big antenna's for any signals travelling thru the air (LOTS of signals doing that, apparently), with the whole mess getting amplified at the END of the chain - the distortion was unlistenable.  Granted, these weren't great cables with great shielding by any stretch of the imagination (they even had a few solder joints in each one), but they seemed to work fine as speaker cables.

I switched them back to the original configuration (short interconnects and long speaker cables) and everything was fine.  YMMV, but that was my experience.