What's the deal with these extra RCA connectors on my old stereo system? Presumably they're for powering the tweeter but the speakers that come with it sound tinny and rubbish, and I've never seen speakers that have RCA cables for the tweeter. Was this Panasonic's way of getting you to use their proprietary speakers or summat?
Bi-amping (separate amplifiers for the woofer and tweeter) is reasonably common on hi-fi equipment. There are good reasons to do it if it's implemented properly, but it's generally a marketing gimmick.
I presume that Panasonic went with RCA connectors for the tweeter to prevent you from accidentally wiring them the wrong way around. The low frequencies intended for the woofer could cause over-excursion and burn out the voice coil if they were sent directly to the tweeter without a crossover or high-pass filter. RCA connectors were probably the cheapest option.
I need to find time to fix my CD player. I haven't had it on for about ten years because all my music comes from my desktop PC or the FM tuner, and it appears that the lubricants inside the CD player have dried up or something. The tray closes although it sometimes needs a push, and then the disc struggles to spin up and three times out of four I get a read error. It's a Denon from the early 2000s and cost 400 quid even back then, so I'm reluctant to bin it.
A lot of surround receivers can be configured to use spare surround channels as bi-amp outputs for the main stereo pair. There are a lot of configurations where this makes perfect sense. Some people will want the switching capabilities of a surround receiver without actually wanting a surround setup, in which case you're probably going to use much bigger main speakers that would benefit from extra power. Some people will have big front speakers, but no space or desire for the extra pair of speakers in a 7.1 setup. Obviously it's a feature you'll only typically find on more expensive receivers, but it isn't a new idea by any means.
There's also the weird audiophile foolishness of "bi-wiring", using separate speaker cables for the woofer and tweeter but connecting them both to the same amplifier output. This is entirely pointless, but we are talking about people who will spend hundreds of pounds on "premium" cables in the belief that pure silver wire sounds better than copper.
> but we are talking about people who will spend hundreds of pounds on "premium" cables in the belief that pure silver wire sounds better than copper
There's always been a lot of voodo going around when it comes to that.
You can probably hear a difference between the thin wires that a lot of speakers come with and some decent hi-fi cable, but expecting the difference to be night and day could leave you disappointed.
I once had a 25-ft, four-channel RCA cable custom made to connect my stereo VCR to my hi-fi system (this was before I had even the most basic soldering skills), and they talked me into low-oxygen cable. Which cost about double the price of regular stranded copper cable, but they told me that when you've got a 25-ft cable, it starts to make a difference. I'm still not sure to this day if it does. I know that it's supposed to lower impedance and cause less signal loss, but it still sounds like a marketing gimmick to me.
I'm willing to buy into that sort of voodoo stuff more when it comes to a fully analogue signal chain, where it's at least plausible (if more than likely highly exaggerated) that every component makes a difference to the end result. And at any rate, if you're going to be the kind of hipster to still listens to vinyl or whatever in 2022, why half arse it?
And there's always merit to shielded, balanced cables in my experience; I got a new pair of monitors a year or two back, but only had cheapo cables because I didn't realise they only took TRS or XLR. So I could actually hear what I eventually figured out was the coil whine of my graphics card's power delivery amplified through the speakers, because evidently it was causing electromagnetic interference to the speaker cables.
As soon as you get to anything digital though, nah, fuck off, it's 100% bollocks.
>if you're going to be the kind of hipster to still listens to vinyl or whatever in 2022, why half arse it?
Vinyl is a tough one though, because its sound has its imperfections and you might end up just bringing out a record's scratches and crackles more.
About 25 to 30 years ago, recording audio on a stereo hi-fi VCR was as close as you could get to perfect sound without buying a dedicated reel to reel machine. Digital audio capture with your computer was also still in its infancy as most desktop PCs didn't have enough disk space to record hours of 16-bit stereo wav audio, and early MP3 encoders both lacked sound quality and were too slow to transcode live audio. A few commercial radio stations even pre-recorded their audio programmes on VHS tape because it was ubiquitous and cheap, as even mid-range tape formulations when used in hi-fi mode exceeded quality requirements for radio broadcasts.
I've still got a few VHS tapes from the early to mid 90s where I recorded entire evenings on Radio 1. Haven't listened to them in 30 years. Maybe I'll digitise them one of these days. There's bound to be loads of interesting stuff on there.
