speaker wire

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Actually, your 14/2 will perform far superior to most of the crap usually sold as speaker wire to clueless audiophiles. Do it!

Harry C.

You should check the "hi fi" that you will be using as some of the older ones (that I used) didn't like to see a long run to the speaker. It was some problem with inductance or something I don't remember the details. Otherwise you should have no problem.

Bill K7NOM

wrote: (clip)Do it! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I agree. Monster cables are a marketing rip-off. I heard a talk by an audio engineer in which this was thoroughly analyzed. The main benefit of those very large cables is in the profit margin. Then there is the placebo effect, which can seem very real to a believer.

I used to know a self-styled "audio expert" who once showed me an article in which five amplifiers were evaluated by an engineer. Four of them were in the $2000 to $5000 range. The fifth was a popular unit which sold for about $250. His rather extensive testing rated the $250 unit right in the middle of the pack. My erstwhile buddy used this to argue that the testing was invalid and that the engineer didn't know anything about what he was doing.

He then went on to claim that engineers and musicians tended to own the worst sounding systems....

On the other hand, one of the finest sounding systems I'd ever heard was in a little recording studio. This was many years ago, long before CD's, etc. The record player was a transcription player with a 35 lb turntable (lots of metal content...). The speakers were a gargantuan pair of Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatres. And the amplifier was a $69.95 DynaKit... And, as I recall, the speaker wires were lamp cord...

Personally, and I'm an engineer by trade, tend to suggest landscape lighting wire in higher powered systems or for long runs, although lamp cord works just fine for lower power/short runs. Lamp cord is typically AWG 16 or AWG 18. Landscape lighting wire looks like lamp cord, but comes in AWG 12 and AWG 14. And it is highly flexible and abrasion-resistant.

But, if you are going to plant it in the walls where it won't be flexed, your plain old power wire (Romex, whatever...) will work just fine. The problem is what to use where you come out of the wall. I'd run the wire between a couple boxes and put on a blank outlet plate in which I'd installed a couple pairs of banana jacks. Then use lamp cord for the short runs between the amplifier and jacks and the speakers and jacks. Or you can use a couple

1/4 in. phone jacks (you can get right angle phone plugs that won't protrude more than about 1/4 in. from the wall...)

One thing NOT to do is to use the ground wire as a "common" and the white and black wires as the "hot" speaker wires. You WILL get some crosstalk between the two channels. But, if you have some, say, 14/3 with ground, you can, say, use the black and white for one channel and the red and ground (bare) for the other. For the same reason, use a plastic outlet plate, not a metal one, to keep the two channels separate, should you elect to use phone jacks.

Jerry

Be aware that any length of wire in excess of about 15 feet can act as an antenna and bring unwanted signals down the line to the amp where it can get amplified and sent back up the wire and through the speakers.

I used to run a College sound recording studio and a CCTV studio and had major problems at one stage from the local radio station signal getting into the system through the long mic leads (we were in 'line of sight' with their powerful transmitter tower). The problem was eventually traced back to a single mic lead with a 'ground fault'.

I am also a radio ham and at one time lived in an apartment building and never caused any interference problems until the 'super' came home one day with a new 'surround sound' system and I was blasting right through it whenever I transmitted! The problem was nothing to do with my set up (I hadn't changed anything) but rather it was his very long runs of cheap speaker wire picking up my signal and feeding it back through the very poor filtering on his 'cheapo' amp. The solution in this case was to fit ferrite rings/loops at either end of his speaker leads and he never heard me again.

If you are going to run long speaker leads it may pay you to invest in a few ferrite rings/loops and save yourself a lot of headaches down the road. They are readily available from the likes of Radio Shack at reasonable prices.

As I think on it though, problems arise if someone thinks the wire is in fact part of the house wiring[at some point in the distant future] and hooks it up as such.....might want ot differentiate

>

I'm down to the point where I run nothing but 3/4" flex plastic conduit for all my data/audio lines. That way I can upgrade to whatever is the current state of the art. Who would have thought that Cat 5e cable would now be obsolete when I did some remodeling 5 years ago? Especially since

5e was not available when I did it!!!

habbi wrote:

They look impressive, personally, I listen to everything with earphones to overcome tinnitus. Gerry :-)} London, Canada

Just remember that when you go into Radio Shack, speak very slowly and don't ask for "ferrite rings, ferrite supressors or even the word ferrite." Just ask for those donut looking thingies that you've seen on some wires before.

Shawn

I'm no EE, but I can't help but feel that the monster cable craze is

*somewhat* over rated. I fully intend to run stranded 10 gage THHN wires to my speaker locations in the new house I'm building, and out to the shop, underground, in conduit.

Harold

The solution in this case was

That's a great tip, Larry. Would you mind detailing how these ferrite rings are installed? In my case, consider that I'd have my wire running in EMT for one set of speakers, and in PVC sch. 40 plastic in the other. Each set terminates in a steel box, and the runs would be made of stranded 10 gage THHN wire, color coded to insure proper phasing. I'd like to make sure we don't get any noise that isn't a part of the music!

Thanks---

Harold

I am an EE (well, technically I am, but I've never practiced it) and I've never understood this craze with speaker wire size. There are only a couple of fundamental parameters that apply: resistance, capacitance, and inductance.

Resistance: if you deliver 100 watts (an enormance amount) to an 8 ohm speaker, 3.5 amps will flow. Wire resistance has 2 effects: heating and voltage drop. In 16 ga wire, the current density will be about

1ma/circ-mill. I.e., heating will be minimal. 200 feet of 16 ga wire (100 feet each way) has a resistance of .8 ohms. Carrying 3.5 amps the wire will have a voltage drop of 2.8 v. Putting it another way, the wire will consume 10 watts (10%). I'm not sure how this is relevant since voltage/power drop is just compensated for by cranking up the volume. So 16 ga wire should more than meet the resistance requirement.

I wouldn't think that the capacitance and inductance of the wire could be anything but negligible. And I can't see how the wire size would have a significant effect on them even if they aren't negligible.

There is another consideration: that of the wire acting as an antenna. This wouldn't effect the loudspeaker, but could feedback to the amplifier. Again, I would think that wire size would not be a consideration for this effect.

Use 14 ga: it will be a lot cheaper, it will be a lot easier, and it will be way more that necessary.

But don't take my word for it - I'm sure that this has been debated endlessly on the "hi-fi" NG's - Google is your friend.

Bob

Don't use solid wire for speaker audio. Most of the higher frequency current in audio travels through 'skin effect' on the outer layer of the copper, and fine stranded wire is a bit lower resistance at high audio frequencies. Plus, you are going to be moving and flexing it a lot at the ends, and solid wire breaks when this happens.

12-2 SPT-2 stranded "Malibu Light" wire. Big zip-cord. Inexpensive and works well in that application, and comes polarized so you can keep all your speakers in phase. You want to avoid the nasty listening effects in the room when one speaker is out of phase with the others - dead spots like the "Cone Of Silence"... ;-)

If you're going more than 50'-100' or so with the signal (like "out to the shop") use a 70-volt amplifier system to do it, and drop it back to 8-ohm at the far end with a speaker transformer. Otherwise you get a distorted signal trying to push 8-ohm audio too far, from the capacitive/inductive effects of the cable. That's why they have to apply loading coils every ~6,000' on long telephone cables.

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A couple of people have mentioned the possibility that the speaker leads could act as an antenna, and pick up unwanted radio signals. If you consider that the output of an audio amp is very low impedance (8 ohms), it would take a hugely strong radio field to generate any appreciable voltage in that circuit. Secondly, it is hard for me to see how a radio frequency, applied to the output circuit of an audio system could have any effect.

Round-trip resistance of a 100 ft run of 12 gage is about 0.375 ohms, less than 5% of the Z of an 8 ohm speaker. 14 gage would be about 0.6 ohms total.

Skin depth in copper at 20 KHz is about .014 in -- but there isn't high-frequency power in music. Stranded wire won't help much with skin effect unless the strands are insulated from each other as in Litz wire.

Given the skin depth, use of gold-plated anything is absolutely absurd.

LOL........very true........the Shack 'droids' around here seem particularly dense too. They would probably send you down the road to Tim Horton's or Krispy Kreme if you asked for a donut!

The "skin effect" does not come into play at audio frequencies. You would need ears and electronics that work at several Mhz (Million cycles per second).

Using a 70V output system requires transformers which will add more distortion and frequency response aberrations then running long wire runs. If you are worried about damping factor at low frequencies, use an amp with high damping factor (no tubes) . Preferably a Crown Microtech or a Labgruppen. :-) And just go up in size for your solid wiring.

Cheers T.Alan (E.E)