Alternate Speaker Wiring

[GatewayJames]

I am in the process of building a home theater. I am relatively new to the audio end but have a background in computers and electrical.

I have been researching the best solutions for speaker wire (price vs quality). I have seen DIY for using network cable for speaker wiring (seems very tedious). Also using other types of wire for better quality and lower price.

However, I ran across a company called Sumiko that is very pricey. They have a loud speaker wire. It looks like coaxial cable (RG6) but it has a copper sheath (cosmetic??) and it may have a different insulation material.

My question is, as I cannot find anything on the subject, would it be beneficial to use dual strands of coaxial cable as speaker wire? Just soldering the solid copper wire to connectors in wall face plates?

It seems, without doing the math, that induction, capacitance, etc... would be great. But I may be missing something.

Anyone have thoughts or experience in this?

[Cal Weldon]

There are many thoughts and opinions on this. Here are mine.

I believe one has to consider the whole picture before making a decision. By that I mean that monies should be apportioned to equipment according to it's importance or effect on the system.

I am of the belief that speaker wire is down the list when it comes to what you can spend versus what you receive as a benefit. I use standard 16 ga, 14 ga and 10 ga copper multi strand speaker cables depending on the length of the run. ie: 16 ga for between the XO and the drivers, 14 ga for up to 20 foot runs and 10 ga for anything longer than that.

I have done listening tests (non-scientific testing) and have a difficult time believing that the monies allotted to cables by some are where I would spend my hard earned dollars. It's not to say different cables don't make a difference, it is to say that there are areas where very noticeable improvements can be made with the same allotment of funds. I believe you can do much better things for your system than spend a wheelbarrow of cash on cables.

I see no reason to spend more than 1% of your system outlay on speaker cables and interconnects.

Now, let's watch the sparks fly

[TerryO]

I think that I'm of the same mind as Cal. Not all cables sound alike, especially the poor ones or the "special" cables that tailor the sound (usually they have a special HiTec box attached).

Dan Wiggins has long claimed that if you can hear it, he can measure it. He received some $pecial Audiophile speaker cables once that the owner wanted measured, and sure enough there was a definite saddle-shaped dip in the mid frequencies. Looked just like what you'd get with an RC network mounted in that famous "Box." A few years later some intrepid soul from...Belgium I think it was, opened the "box" on that same brand of cables to find a block of black epoxy. In the classic tradition of an Archeologist, he carefully removed the epoxy using dental instruments. Well, to make this a little shorter, it was exactly what the dip suggested, except that the components weren't exactly Audiophile quality.

One real problem that I'm aware of is that cables, mostly ICs, really manifest most of their differences at higher frequencies and that's the region that most men, and I'm certainly in that group, have problems hearing as they get older. If someone says that the treble is slightly muted, I'll just take their word for it as I probably (definitely?) can't hear it anyway.

One of our Audio Club members, who has a "very" High End system mentioned a couple of years back that he'd been auditioning a pair of 8 foot speaker cables that sounded very nice, but they wanted $25,000 (USD) for them. He then mentioned that he was able to get the salesman down to $22,500, so he bought them. If it completed his system, and he has really nice (& $$$$) gear, then the more power to him. I might mention that those two cables cost almost more than all the cars I've ever owned put together.

One solution I've seen, that was novel and the owner really liked in his Tri-amped system, used 1/2 inch copper plumbing pipe for speaker cable. He actually had cut and soldered 6 pipes per side from his centrally located amps to the speakers, using elbows and terminating in a cap with a 12 AWG pigtail (approximately 1.5 inches) at each end for connection purposes. He had polished the copper pipe with jeweler's rouge and then coated them with jeweler's lacquer. It had an Art Deco look as it ran across his back wall mounted on standoffs. Hardly portable, but his was a dedicated listening room, so that wasn't a major concern. Pretty good idea as the surface area was tremendous when you consider that there was an outer and an inner surface for the electrons to utilize.
He finally arrived at an even better solution (as he told it), by building amp racks behind each speaker and installed the three Bryston monoblocks facing the rear wall behind the speaker and constructed so each amp could be connected to each driver section by a 2 1/2 inch piece of 12 AWG wire. He claimed that in his quest for ultimate resolution price was no object, even if it was 69 cents !!!

So I'll just say that with my ears and system, there are a lot of areas that I'd be working on before I start getting too concerned about cables. The differences between "well constructed" cables being a lot smaller than the resolution of my present system and there are lots of areas that I can improve significantly and at a far lower cost than expensive cables.

Best Regards,
TerryO

[AMV8]

I also support Cal.

Speaker cables should be short and thick. I use multi strand silver coated copper in a PTFE/ETFE sleeve. Use thick cable with a good insulator such as ETFE.

If you have long distances to cover it is better to cover these with cables for pre amp to power amp keeping cables from power amp to speaker short if possible.

My experience has shown me the following; Spend your money on the front end sources first. Then on the pre amp and then power amp. Cables come last on the list.

Don

[AndrewT]

Hi,
keep your speaker cables short.
Move the amps right next to the speakers and then you will find that speaker cable has no effect (or virtually none) on the sound.

Now spend some money on good screened twisted pair for your long interconnects. If your pre-amp has low source impedance (Rs<=50r) you can get away with just twisted pair (CAT5) and save more money.

It might be worth your while converting all your input/output plugs and sockets to XLR for the secure connection they give. Cat5 and XLR will allow conversion to balanced at a later date without throwing away any of your built in cabling.
Some spare CAT5 cores can do a bit of remote signalling to power up power down as well.
Another thread
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showt...91#post1268191
even suggests using RJ45 for your interconnects. Now that would save even more money. You'll just about have this HT pay for itself.

[KP11520]

I used (what looks like magnet wire) oxygen free 12 AWG copper with a reddish clear, either enamel, formvar or polyurethane coating as an insulator (very thin coating). I cut four 10 foot lengths for two 10 foot cables. I twisted the 10 foot lengths 35 times (or as I read 3-4 times per foot). Then I soldered with silver solder, Eichmann Bayonet (banana) plugs onto each end. Sounds amazing for cheap witre. The Bayonet plugs are where all the money went. You can substitute for any spades or bananas you want to keep it in your budget. Just try to keep the cables away from as much as possible between the amp and speakers to keep the capacitance down. All the measurements will be where you want them. Resistance = 0.00318 Ohms/foot run, Inductance = 0.30uH/foot run, Capacitance = 0.048nF/foot run.

My cousin gave me some fancy bi wire Onix (four strands per cable) speaker cables with gold plated spades on one end and gold plated bananas on the other (all with screw sets). I replaced them with my magnet wire DIY cables and now don't know what to do with the Onix cables. I have no use for them and would encourage my friends to do what I did! In my mind I heard a significant difference.

This is one idea of about a million or so!

Good luck!

Regards//Keith

[OzMikeH]

Originally posted by TerryO

One solution I've seen, that was novel and the owner really liked in his Tri-amped system, used 1/2 inch copper plumbing pipe for speaker cable.

Best Regards,
TerryO

That's not so big, here's my interconnects.
juat wait till you see the speaker cable. ha ha,

[DSP_Geek]

I've had very good results with 4 parallel runs of RG-8. I tried the Jon Risch cross-connected configuration but I didn't like it. The final setup ended up as all cores tied together to a pigtail on each end, and the same for all the shields. It works well, but the four lengths of RG-8 are a bit unwieldy, so next on my to-do list will be four paralleled runs of mini RG-8, which has most of the characteristics of its full-sized cousin except for slightly higher DC resistance.

The original cable seems to work for two reasons:

1) Very low series inductance means there's little interaction with the speaker's impedance. This is especially evident with pathological high frequency loads such as electrostatics, but one can detect subtle effects when driving complex crossovers with large impedance swings in the midrange.

2) The shielded cable means little RF garbage gets back into the amplifier's feedback loop, a concern mostly for cities or other RF-heavy environments.