Apropos of nothing in particular, I was looking at speaker cables on Blue Jeans Cables. They have a four-conductor cable that's more or less a big-ass star quad mic cable. People apparently use it for bi-wiring in a single cable. It's so cheap they practically pay you to take it away.

 

I need a short run of cable to go from the speaker outputs of a little tube amp to a powered subwoofer in my den. It's one of those deals where there's a speaker-level input and a crossover so you can high-pass the output of your amp to the main speakers if you want. I don't have speakers connected there. I just use it to drive the sub. I don't know the z-in, so I don't know how much current would flow in this cable run. Not much, I suspect. The channels are summed at the sub, but in what fashion, I don't know.

 

So, the question is: could I run both channels in a single four-conductor cable without them interfering with each other, giving that only the sum of the low frequencies from the channels counts? If so, it would save a tangle of cabling. If the star-quad-i-ness of the thing actually accomplished something in the way of causing or accepting less interference with the other cables in the rats' nest, that would be cool too.

 

 

 

 

Interference here would mean crosstalk, and since you are summing them, you are causing 100% crosstalk anyway. I think you are fine.

 

And, if there is nothing inside the subwoofer to dissipate a bunch of heat, then the Zin is likely high. You can most likely resistance measure across the input to find this out.

Not that it lends anything to his credibility, but I agree with Doug. You're good to go, Carl.

It's what I think, too. But Doug's opinion is an order of magnitude more likely to be right than mine. I'll order a supply of cable and a fistfull of bananas henceforth.