QSC Audio CX Series user manual Wire Loss

Models: CX Series

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WIRE LOSS

speaker, it will affect the sound level from the distributed line’s speakers also, possibly altering them from your intended levels.

An alternate method is to attach an 8-ohm speaker across the 25-volt outputs. This provides up to approximately 80 watts to the speaker and makes more power available to the 70V or 100V connections: up to 75 watts for the CX4T, up to 150 watts for the CX6T; up to 400 watts for the CX12T.

WIRE LOSS

Even the highest-quality copper wire has a small amount of resistance to electrical current flow, and the wire’s resistance is inversely proportional to the cross-sectional area of its conductor. Therefore, to minimize the power lost to speaker cable resistance, you should use the largest stranded (always stranded) copper wire that is practical for the job. This is especially important with direct low-impedance speaker connections; e.g., a half- ohm wire resistance would not affect a lightly-loaded 100-volt line noticeably, but it would reduce the amount of power going to a 2-ohm load by 36%, a 1.9 dB drop. It would also reduce the damping factor to no better than 4.

If an amplifier could drive a speaker load through theoretical zero-resistance wire, no power would be lost in the speaker cables. In the charts below we’ll compare the power delivered through real-world speaker cables with the theoretical zero-resistance ideal and express it as a ratio called the power transfer coefficient. It is determined by the formula

POWER TRANSFER COEFFICIENT = [RLOAD/(RWIRE + RLOAD)]2

Let’s say you have an 8-ohm speaker load. With that imaginary zero-resistance wire, all the power would be delivered to the load, so the power transfer coefficient would be 1. If you then substituted wire with 0.2 ohm of resistance, the load would only get 95.2% of the power it got with the zero-ohm wire, so the power transfer coefficient would be 0.952 (a loss of 0.2 dB, by the way).

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QSC Audio CX Series user manual Wire Loss