This post in in the same genre of cables (my last query was about HDMI cables and thanks I got good convincing responses). This one is about speaker cables.
I am connecting my Pioneer receiver to my focal surround sound speakers. My retailer sold me $80 audioquest cables (apaparently they are thicker and the wires don't intertwine i.e. they go through straight). I was told I will hear the difference between cheaper speaker wires and these. Is there a difference between using these speaker wires or the cheaper 16 guage belkin speaker wires ($25) or the monster speaker wires ($35)
As a physical element Copper works well as a suitable conductor for your speaker cables. Despite claims to contrary, God holds the patent, not Monster cable or anyone else, nor does Magick Faerie Dust or liquid nitrogen treatment make it behave any differently.
Go to your nearest Home Depot, Lowe's, etc. and buy yourself a 14 gauge extension cord as long as both of your present cables.
Cut it in half, strip and tin the ends or do whatever you have to to get the ends connected between the amp and the speakers.
Play something, listen to it, disconnect the cables from the stereo, reconnect the expensive cables and listen again.
If you can't tell the difference take the expensive cables back and get a refund.
If you think you _can_ tell the difference, then get someone to hook up the cables so you won't know which is which and listen again. Have whoever is doing the connecting keep track of which cable is which and to switch them around while you say what sounds better or worse, and to keep track of your responses for each switch.
Not quite double-blind, but close enough, and I'd be willing to bet that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the expensive cables and the extension cord. :-)
Yes, there is a difference. The question, as JF has said, is whether or not it matters to your ears. If you could hear a sonic difference, I think you could get a job as an equipment reviewer at one of those high-end audio magazines evaluating "soundstages" and such. But let's assume you have merely a mortal's ears. There is another factor in play: fun. Yes, there's something satisfying about knowing that the path between your amp and speakers has enough copper in it to start a car. To get the maximum fun, you should think about building this stuff, rather than plunking down big bux for high-end cables (unless you're filthy rich and would rather spend the time disrobing pretty females, etc.).
One thing you should know about is skin effect (no, nothing to do with disrobing). As the sonic frequencies increase, the current is forced closer to the outside of the conductor (the skin). If high enough, say radio frequencies, all of the current is in the skin, so hollow pipes will do fine and not waste copper. Or plate the skin with a better conductor, like silver. Commercially, dividing the conductor up into many insulated wires is an attempt to increase the skin area and minimize the impedance.
Now for some more fun. Suppose you took 2-inch-diameter copper water pipes and ran them parallel to each other as the speaker conductors? Or whatever diameter will give you enough crosssectional area equivalent to Monster cables. The skin area would be huge. And (here's the fun part) if you polish them up like a mirror (and lacquer them to stay that way), they would look like you have your own haydron collider! Yes, I know water pipe is not "oxygen-free copper" (Wiki it), but it would still look cool, and you could at least have the satisfaction of knowing that even if it is not the best there is, you are so close to it that you needn't strain yourself trying to hear the difference. After all, just relaxing and enjoying the music should probably rank up at the top of all this, shouldn't it? Or perhaps just below the disrobing.
i was using a bunch of left over Romex for speaker cables for years. didn't notice any roll off of the highs, but then i'm an olding male so have no hearing worth a damn anyway. but the advantage was that with my little rogers ls3/5a minimonitors, the wires served as their own speaker stand.
you want to have an optimal system; try soldering the speaker wire at each end. most folks don't disassemble their stereo that often, and even if the connections are good when new they often deteriorate with age, no matter what the setup; phono plugs, screws, etc. anyway, my point is that the difference between lamp cord of adequate wire size and the best million dollar solid silver cable, if any, will be much much less than the difference between a good connection, i.e. soldered, and a connection that's starting to get oxidized and/or loose.
also note that a lot of fancy component interconnects (i can't say re speaker cables here) come with remarkably shoddy phono plugs which do very much get loose and oxidized over time. given the manufacturing cost of a real welol designed and functioning (for instance, designed to connect ground before signal) phono plug vs the manufacturing cost of a foot of even the best cable, i can see why they'd skimp on the connectors if they want to drop the cost.
don't know about brilliant pebbles; but definitely the biggest variable in a good sound system today is the room, and its interaction with the speakers. hard to imagine fixing it with a bunch of crystals; sound absorbing and reflecting materials and moving the speakers around are the way we used to do it in the old days when physics was something you learned in school and not over the internet.
and we used to theorize that the wonderous effects reported heard with all the mouse fur insulated speaker cables and internets and so on were probably the result of nonlinearities which coincidentally and fortuitously happened to improve the acoustics/interactions of the reviewers listening room and speakers. because some of those huge dollar golden ear items turn out to have astoundingly far from flat lab measurements.
Andy I think you can tell from the replies that when it comes to electricity including at audio and musical frequencies, a wire, is a wire, is a wire. As long as there is good wire connection between the outputs of the amplifier and each speaker it doesn't matter what kind of wire is used. If you could keep the two wires to eac speaker separated not touching together and with good connections at each end you could use barbed wire!
One of the cheaper ways to buy wire, as someone has suggested, is to buy a cheap extension cord. Even the cheapest made in China/Mexico/ Taiwan etc. will be at least 18 AWG copper.
That gauge of wire has a resistance of about 6.5 ohms per 1000 feet, so even allowing that there are two wires to and from the speaker, even if the distance is say twice 50 feet =3D 100 ft. (and most speakers are not far away as far as wiring is concerned?) that is only 0.65 ohms introduced into a nominal 8 ohm circuit.
There is no need to use car booster gauge cables for normal domestic listening. If one is deal with 2000 watt public announcement/rap- festival that's another matter.
Even at a sound peak of 100 watts (watch your eardrums!) the loss in
18 AWG cabling will be 8% or less; not noticeable to the logarithmic human ear which needs a doubling of power (3dB) to notice any difference. And it will not be (at audio/music) frequency sensitive.
No wonder there is the semi technical term 'Audiophoolishness'! Happy listening.
Actually, there's a rather interesting analysis at
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I haven't run the numbers myself -- too late on a Sunday evening to have anything at all to do with Bessel functions -- but at a quick look, it looks credible.
Shorter version: There is a fractional dB loss at higher audio frequencies that could reasonably be expected to be accounted for in analytic work but which is quite negligable for ordinary (and even extraordinary) listening, so go ahead and use zip cord.
I would put that into 12 AWG territory, although I give good chance at getting away with that (audio duty) with 14 AWG and "fair chance" for audio duty with 16 AWG.
Keep in mind RMS currents to be sustained for 15-30 seconds or so. Please keep in mind worst case of misuse or abuse.
My experience in USA is that 12 AWG extension cords and 12 AWG "Romex" have nobody saying that they are fire hazards at 20 amps RMS (determined over time period of anywhere from 1/120 second to a few seconds). And that 14 AWG extension cords and "Romex" are similarly good for 14 amps RMS.
Going along those lines, I am suspicious of 13 amp rating of 16 AWG extension cords - with the above data, I consider "similarly conservative" rating of 16 AWG extension cords to be about 11 amps, not the 13 amps that many 16 AWG extension cords are "rated for".
Back to loudspeaker cable:
Check into impedance as a function of frequency when that is available. Otherwise I advise to suspect that impedance as a function of frequency can at "significant audio frequencies" (30 Hz to 16 KHz) be anywhere from
71% of rated to 4 times rated. If the cable resistance and amplifier output impedance add up to low enough to have gain from amplifier input to loudspeaker terminal constant within a .5 dB range from 35 Hz (or loudspeaker -3 dB bass response point, whichever is higher) on up to 15 KHz, then I suspect that there is not much room for improvement other than use of a better loudspeaker. And I am highly satisfied that a loudspeaker achieving +/- 3 dB from
36 Hz to 16 KHz (without smoothing such as requirement of significant bandwidth of "narrowband noise" signal or fast sweep rate of a swept sinewave signal) is especially good! Heck, a loudspeaker is good when achieving +/- 4 dB over that frequency range when specifying source impedance! "Damping factor" of an amplifier is ratio of specified load impedance to output source impedance of the apmlifier. That needs to get down to about
16 or so or less to change "frequency response" of a loudspeaker by 1 dB or so!
4 square mm is approx. 11 AWG
18 AWG is close enough to 1 mm in diameter. Increase of 3 is close enough to halving cross section area - think like decibels, except bigger number is smaller wire. This works well enough from 2 to 46 or something like that.
18 AWG =3D 0.8232 sq.mm
16 AWG =3D 1.309
14 AWG =3D 2.081
12 AWG =3D 3.309
10 AWG =3D 5.261
9 AWG which I've never seen =3D 6.632 sq.mm
8 AWG =3D 8.368
7 AWG which AFIK have also never seen =3D 10.55 sq.mm
6 AWG =3D 13.30 These except as indicated are all the readily available sizes, today, at hardware and building supply stores throughout North America. Noticeable that none of these are an exact number of sq.mm.! The 4sq.mm cable beloved by UK style installations typically for their ring mains with switched outlets and 13 amp fused plugs looks to be 'sort' the equivalent of 11 AWG. Domestically AFIK in North American practice we use a greater number of 'radial' (individual circuits) not ring mains. Interestingly sheet boards and lumber which metrically have rather unwieldy measurements such as 1200 by 2400 mm. (4' x 8') or 100 by 50 mm. (A two by four) are still referred to the non metric way. e,g. "A bundle of pre cut two by four studs". Or "A half dozen sheets of four by eight, half inch plywood".
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