Considering both lines are supposed to carry the same volts or offer the same resistance, as long as I know what is what in my setup it doesn’t matter much.
The other day I was talking with a friend and he said commonly the striped line is used to carry the negative.
Is there a standard on speaker cables (or regular low volt lines) where the striped line is negative?
I have found the striped is usually the positive lead on factory made speaker wire products. It really doesn’t matter as long as the wiring is + to + and - to -.
Actually, it doesn’t even really matter if you wire your speakers + to - and - to +, so long as you do both of them the same. All reversing the wires does is invert the phase.
Agree… you want to make sure the relative phase between the two speaker is correct. So either of these two arrangements would be acceptable:
#1
Amplifier, left channel, + ----------------- Left speaker, +
Amplifier, left channel, - ----------------- Left speaker, -
Amplifier, right channel, + ----------------- Right speaker, +
Amplifier, right channel, - ----------------- Right speaker, -
#2
Amplifier, left channel, + ----------------- Left speaker, -
Amplifier, left channel, - ----------------- Left speaker, +
Amplifier, right channel, + ----------------- Right speaker, -
Amplifier, right channel, - ----------------- Right speaker, +
The only difference between #1 and #2 is that the absolute phase is 180° apart. But the absolute phase doesn’t matter, so either of these two arrangements would be acceptable.
If you move the speakers right next to each other you will get cancellation of low frequencies and you should hear some phasing effects if you move your head from side to side. The effect will be better with a mono source.
In the normal stereo setup having the speakers out of phase knackers the stereo “picture” and you lose the definite left/right placing of sounds. Something that should sit bang in the centre of the mix (typically kick and snare drums) sort of floats in the air. Try it and see (or hear, even). Once you know what out-of-phase speakers sound like you can hear it all the time in shops that play music over multiple speakers.
I’ve been in stores where they wire the cheap speakers (or speakers on sale) out of phase to make it easier to upsale to the speakers with a better margin.
Sad really.
Anyway, so the answer is striped is commonly positive?
I’m not sure what the convention in industry is. But the bottom line is that it doesn’t matter. I’ve always used the striped wire for negative. But again, it doesn’t matter.
If I ruled the world, the striped wire would be ground (-). But the convention seems to be that it’s actually the drive signal (+). As mentioned, it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re consistent.
A really anal hi-fi buff will check the phase of their driver units, as it’s rare but not unknown for a speaker to be internally wired up backwards by mistake.
There is a school of thought* that says that absolute phase does matter, the theory being that the rising edge of the amplitude envelope of something like a bass drum will be much bigger than the negative swing. This can be important in terms of working air-pressure ranges - a speaker can push hard to create a big positive pressure, but it’s limited by atmospheric pressure in how hard it can pull in the other direction. You can blow as hard as you like, but you can’t suck lower than a vacuum!
It can be shown that phase inversions are indeed audible to someone with trained ears.