Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ.

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Re: Does 100 m of copper sound better than 1 m of nichrome?

Posted by Steve Eddy on August 8, 2005 at 21:00:44

In Reply to: Re: Does 100 m of copper sound better than 1 m of nichrome? posted by andyr on August 8, 2005 at 18:24:03:

I was thinking if one of these reses had to withstand, say, 20w continuous of power (when put in series with a Maggie panel), that's probably 1/2 an amp?

If a 0.68 ohm resistor is dissipating 20 watts, that means you've got about 5.4 amps running through it. Which means if the speaker is a 4 ohm load you've got about 116 watts in the speaker.

So when you say 20 watts, do you mean that the RESISTOR has to dissipate 20 watts or that the SPEAKER is dissipating 20 watts? If you mean the speaker, and the speaker is 4 ohms, then that comes to about 2.2 amps which means the 0.68 ohm resistor will only have to dissipate about 3.4 watts.

As for the wire, see if you can round up some resistance wire under the name Advance, or Cupron, or Copel, or Alloy 45 or Cuprothol 294. These are trade names for a 55% copper/45% nickel alloy resistance wire. Although it has nickel in it it's non-magnetic and in my opinion sounds fantastic (I had Mills make some custom resistors for me out of this alloy which I used in a headphone amp).

Resistance per foot for this alloy is 2.94 ohms for 30 gauge so you'd only need what, about 3 inches to get your 0.68 ohms? Just use two 1.5" lenghts, one in each leg.

se

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