big sound for the barn - part 4

Time to make up a pair of bi-wire speaker wires as I cannot find the pair that I have. I decide 9 feet should be enough for all the possible locations that I would place this sound system in the barn.

I figured out this simple way to joint two conductors at the amplifier side without doubling the additive diameter of the conductor ends as doubling them will not fit into the binding post holes. A soldered end is my favorite method. Clean, simple, and effective.

I coiled one conductor around the other and solder them

the speaker ends are just simply soldered

I bought a ton of this US made speaker wire from Home Depot long ago and they are excellent quality and flexible.

Up to now I have only been auditioning the system setup with Apple Music feed to the amplifier via Bluetooth using a cheapo Chinese made hockey puck receiver. I wanted to compare them with a few of my excellent CD recordings. It never cease to amaze me the percentage of poor recordings out there. The worst are the Classical genre. As a lot are "newly remastered" which means digitize vinyl records. Vinyl has only around 85 dB of dynamic range.

I was expecting the CD sound quality would be immediately discernible from streaming audio but not with my causal auditioning. This Taj Mahal is an excellent recording. All my good CDs have one thing in common, the recording engineer took care to set the volume baseline. Most poorly recorded albums tends to set them too low, which means throwing away precious dynamic range recording capacity.

this peak measurement of over 100 dB was taken at 15 feet from the speakers

It is an ear opener to experience in a big volume as in the barn 100 dB of sound is not that loud when you walked away fifty feet. Without changing the volume control I took a peak measurement at 50 feet.

sound level at 50 feet

81.5 dB at 50 feet