I’m thinking of getting a home theater system (because straight guys decorate with electronics). I’ve heard that the wire that comes packaged with most audio equipment is junk, and that it’s worth it to buy better.
So what do I need to look for? What should I spend?
And, as an aside, why would companies sabotage their own product by including low-grade wire?
Thanks.
Unless you buy an all-in-one system, the speakers will probably not come with any speaker wire. Just make sure that you don’t buy that small guage (thin) wire that is sold as “speaker wire”.
You can just use 18 (or preferably 16) guage lamp cord. I wouldn’t bother with the expensive speciality speaker wire. Although if the wire will be visible you may want to consider buying an appropriate length of the cheapest Monster Cable wire which looks nice.
The realm of audio cables, including speaker wire, entails much magic and a little science. Unlike, say, drug marketers, audio cable sellers don’t have to verify all claims. So the consumer is bombarded and seduced by some pretty remarkable statements. You will get zillions of opinions across the board.
I tend to focus on affordable cables that are well built, meaning that the physical connections from wire to plug are strong and the materials won’t corrode (I live near salt water) within a few years.
Speaker wire requires less engineering than other audio cables so it should not cost you a lot. The longer the distance from your speakers to your amplifier, the thicker the speaker wire must be. But most popular speaker wire should satisfy your requirements. Many folks think that zip cord (lamp electrical wire) works as well as anything.
I got a cheap roll of Monster XP at Home Depot. My system sounds great. But that’s just me. This site I like:
http://home.earthlink.net/~rogerr7/wire.htm
Audio manufacturers include cheesy cables with their products to provide bigtime upsell opportunities to salespeople. Otherwise their boxes would not be offered.
Unless you are running a high Wattage sound system, good quality low gauge wire should do the trick. Some considerations:[ul][li] The Actual Wire:[/li]
Do not use solid core wire. You will want to install braided copper strands for your speakers. The very highest frequencies of your sound signal prefer to travel on the exterior of the wire strands. RF (Radio Frequency) signals travel exclusively upon the conductor’s surface. Having only one strand (solid core) inhibits the passage of these short wavelength signal components. (I believe this is one of the few valid claims Monster Cable and their ilk are able to make.)
[li] Low Gauge Wire:[/li]
As with above, the overall cross section of the wire influences its ability to conduct energy to your speakers. If you wouldn’t run a decent appliance with the wire, don’t use it for your sound system. Some 16 gauge or lower wire should do just fine. Look for a cable where both conductors are bare copper wire and the insulating sheath has been marked for polarity.
[li] Copper Wire:[/li]
Be sure to use copper wire, preferably not tinned or coated. Copper is among the most electrically (and thermally) conductive metals on (or in the) earth. Gold is one of the few with better conduction properties than copper. Again, this is where the boys at Monster Cable go for your throat (or hip). Unless you spent enough money on your sound system to buy a moderately priced car, forget about gold contacts or gold plated wire (or gold anything). You’ll be missing about 0.01% of your signal at most.
[li] Lay In Your Cables Carefully:[/li]
Avoid running long lengths of speaker wire or unamplified signal conductors immediately next to AC power cords. Electronic “crosstalk” can occur between your wires and the lower power audio signal is usually the loser. In all semiconductor processing equipment, power and signal wiring must be harnessed separately in order to prevent unwanted EMF and RFI noise induction.
[li] Avoid Excess Lengths of Cable:[/li]
Try to keep your cables to the minimum length needed. People often roll up their excess wire into a nice neat coil. Don’t do this, a coil will act like an inductor (choke) and begin to constrain signals in the conductor. Bundle excess wire lengths in a “butterfly” or “bow tie” type of winding. Also, the longer a wire is the more different radio signals and what have you it is capable of acting as an antenna for. Once more, this is where Monster Cable likes to promote their product. Shielded wire is nice, but only mandatory if you are installing a thirty-two track recording studio. Close attention to cable length and management will usually overcome 90% of your problems without spending 10X on your wire.
[li] Connections:[/li]
Run all of your cables in unbroken lengths. Do not try to save money by splicing two lengths of wire together. Just like in the power transmission industry, a lot of loss occurs at splices and junctions. Be sure that your wire ends are neatly twisted (and not tinned) where they connect to the terminals on your amplifier and speakers. I have seen people leave their wire ends so frayed that the loose strands touched down to the other channel’s terminals and shorted out the entire main output stage of their power amplifier. Take care to ensure that all connectors plug in firmly. It should take several ounces of force (or more) to unplug a connector. Ones that rotate easily or feel loose in their receptacle should be adjusted (deflected) so that the contact points more solidly grasp their connection points (as in RCA type jacks).
On another note, be sure to connect all of your speakers exactly the same. This refers to what pole of the signal is attached to which speaker terminal. Reversing the polarity of any given speaker will put it 180° out of phase with the other speakers and can cause sound cancellation or dead spots in reproduction.
[li] Precautions:[/li]
Please be sure to have all wall current to your system turned off completely before connecting components and cables. Severe damage can occur when connecting active signal conductors to live equipment. A surge protecting outlet strip with its own fast acting breaker is also a good idea. Household circuit breakers are slow blow type interruptors and will not respond quickly enough to protect your equipment in case of a meltdown. DO NOT ever remove the third prong of a power cord in order to make it fit into a two prong receptacle. This will sever the ground loop and is not only capable of rendering a component’s chassis electrically charged, but can seriously interfere with elimination of noise and static in your system. Unless you wish to clearly amplify the sound of your blender motor’s commutators, leave all grounding connectors unaltered.[/ul]
I hope this is of some help.
My understanding was that this was one of the biggest lies in the speaker cable business. The “skin effect” is real, no doubt about it, but I was under the impression that even the highest audio frequencies were far too low to exhibit the skin effect, and that skin effect really only became an issue when signals started to approach the high UHF/low microwave range.
Of course, using stranded cable is still preferable for flexibility and because it’s less susceptible to breakage from flexing.
This isn’t an issue unless you’re talking about input cables. Nothing in your average house is going to be capable of inducing enough voltage in a speaker wire to cause an unamplified speaker to respond.
Again, this applies to input cables only and is largely irrelavent to speakers.
I also have serious doubts about the losses caused by splices or the use of tinned wire as opposed to bare copper being significant with speaker wiring, as well as the negative effects of coiling your cables. You’d have to make some pretty big coils with lots of turns before they’d have enough inductance to have a noticable effect on audio frequencies.
If anyone here’s an electrical engineer feel free to jump in and correct me if I’m wrong on any of these points, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.
I’d recommend using the cheapest stranded (for flexibility and reliability, as I said above) 16ga or less (for runs of any significant length, anyway, to reduce resistance and avoid wasting your amp’s power heating the wires) wire you can find. Lamp cord does seem to be a good candidate, but make it’s marked somehow so you can distinguish polarity.
Uhhh… That should be “make sure it’s marked…” in the last sentence there. And to think I even previewed my post.
Skin effect is accurate, as it refers to AC energy, the means by which sound is transmitted to your speakers. DC uses the entire mass of the conductor, which is why a given gauge cable is rated at a higher ampacity for DC than it would be for AC.
The issue of cable length being a fundamental of an antenna is a long shot, IMHO. This issue presumes there being a transmitter in close enough proximity to the cable such that said cable would function as an antenna. Public service still uses low band FM (30-50)MHz in many areas, and high band (150-175)MHz is also popular. Metropolitan areas have been using UHF in the 450 MHz band for better than two decades, and 800 MHz trunked system are now prevalent.
If you’re concerned with wavelength, is it the standing wave, 1/2 wave, 1/4 wave, or a second, third, or fourth harmonic of the primary?
Example: A quarter wave antenna of ordinary wire-
length in feet=234/frequency in megahertz.
For a half wave, the equation is 468/frequency in MHz.
Strange things happen in the world of electronics, so please don’t try to fix a problem until it manifests itself, or you’ll be forever seeking demons.
You’re basically correct with everything you’ve said there. The only thing I’d argue with is the skin effect thing, which definitely becomes measurable at high AF. Whether it’s noticeable to the ear is another matter. I’d say not.
Skin effect at audio frequencies only has an effect on the outer couple hundredths of an inch of the conductor, if I recall correctly.
The bottom line: Go to Home Depot and buy yourself as much 16 ga speaker wire as you need. If you want to go for the best stuff, get 14 Ga. Here in Canada, it’s about 20 cents a foot or so.
I’m a serious music guy, and I’m currently building a custom home theater. All the speaker wiring in that room is 14 ga Home Depot. There will be about $10,000 in Electronics being connected with it. Speaker wire, above a very minimum standard, is irrelevant to sound quality.
Funny you should mention that - I almost wrote “measurable” in that post, but then decided on “noticeable” just to be safe. 
Oh, er, uh… maybe I didn’t write “noticeable,” exactly. Oh, heck, you know what I mean! Heh…
I have an electrical engineer friend who thinks it matters for the speaker cable as well. The argument (if I understand it correctly) is that the cable acts as a loop antenna and some fraction of the power is emitted away instead of reaching the speaker. He uses twisted pair cables to prevent this and claims it makes a difference.
Companies often “sabotage” low end products to differentiate them with their high end models. I don’t know if they do it with low-grade cables though.
At the high end of audio frequency, say 20 kHz, even the longest speaker wire runs are far too short to be an effective radiating antenna. At that frequency, a 1/4-wave antenna needs to be 3750 meters long. 30 meters of wire would be so inefficient at radiating as to be negligible. Technically, your friend is correct, but he’s silly if he really thinks it matters.
Thanks for all the answers.
I’ve seen recommendations here ranging from 18 gauge wire to 14. Let me ask the assembled experts here: Will I be okay with 16 gauge, or should I opt for 14? What’s the price difference?
Also: what characteristics of the wire are absolutely necessary? Shielding?
(I’m not an electrician, so the technical material here is over my head.)
16 AWG is fine for most systems with short to medium-length runs and power of around 500 watts or under. Much more power, or for very long wire runs, go with the heavier 14 AWG. shielding is completely unnecessary for speaker wire. As stated previously, ordinary lamp cord works just fine. Normally one side has ridges to indicate polarity, so both speakers will be in phase.
Slight nitpick: Copper is more conductive than gold.
Cross-talk between speaker cables & AC lines is rarely a problem. This is because the amplifier’s output circuit is very low impedance.
Don’t pay attention to the fancy ads in Audio and Stereophile; they’re full of BS. Just install some 16 AWG wire and be done with it.
My company installs fancy, overpriced* interconnection cables but uses plain ol’ 14ga for speaker cable runs that can be hundreds of feet. It works fine.
Thanks, everyone. I was getting the feeling that a lot of the ads for premium wire were BS. Now I know.
I realize gold ended connections have no superior sound qualities but the point should be made for corrosion. I’ve seen plenty of corroded rca and coaxial connectors that would make me pay extra for the gold.
Also, how does everyone feel about bannana plugs?
Do they really offer a better connection than the clips?
They appear to have more surface area contact where they are plugged into the speaker but what about the contact between the actaul wire and the plug itself?
Don’t wrap it tightly around your scrotum. Trust me on this.