Hi,
I built a pair of Dallas II cabinets with Fostex drivers. I also bought some Blue Jean Cable 10awg speaker wire. How can I solder this wire to the terminals on the back of the driver? I am trying to keep things very simple and clean but maybe I am crazy for wanting to do this? Should I just buy some smaller wire and binding posts? Or maybe try to drill a bigger hole on the driver tab?
Thanks,
m
I built a pair of Dallas II cabinets with Fostex drivers. I also bought some Blue Jean Cable 10awg speaker wire. How can I solder this wire to the terminals on the back of the driver? I am trying to keep things very simple and clean but maybe I am crazy for wanting to do this? Should I just buy some smaller wire and binding posts? Or maybe try to drill a bigger hole on the driver tab?
Thanks,
m
Normally you would use smaller, flexible wires between binding posts and the driver.
If you must, be sure to strain relief the 10awg wire before it connects to the driver,
and allow some slack.
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If you MUST use the 10 gauge wire, you don't have to solder ALL its strands to the speaker terminals - thin them out till the terminals can accept the width of copper. This will not introduce any measurable resistance to the length of internal wiring.
However, to prevent the weight of the wire from inducing terminal fatigue, you should loop it upwards and cable tie it to the speaker basket.
However, to prevent the weight of the wire from inducing terminal fatigue, you should loop it upwards and cable tie it to the speaker basket.
Just introducing a touch of reality 
A typical woofer voice coil can have some 15 meters of 0.25mm round copper wire, it would be about 30AWG , with 10 times less diameter and 100 times more resistance per unit of length of your AWG10 wire.
And to boot I doubt the internal wiring surpasses 1 meter.
My point being that using AWG10 instead of easier to handle, say, AWG16 or AWG18 makes absolutely no audible (or measurable) improvement in your cabinet wiring.
Now, if your speakers are, say, 10 to 30 meters away from the amplifier, yes, there thick wire is justified.
A typical woofer voice coil can have some 15 meters of 0.25mm round copper wire, it would be about 30AWG , with 10 times less diameter and 100 times more resistance per unit of length of your AWG10 wire.
And to boot I doubt the internal wiring surpasses 1 meter.
My point being that using AWG10 instead of easier to handle, say, AWG16 or AWG18 makes absolutely no audible (or measurable) improvement in your cabinet wiring.
Now, if your speakers are, say, 10 to 30 meters away from the amplifier, yes, there thick wire is justified.
Just to be clear, was it your plan to hardwire directly between the speaker’s voice coil terminals and amplifier outputs? If so, I think you’re asking for trouble, and unless running many meters, with little if any audible benefit. I’d definitely suggest using binding posts, and shortest internal length of thinner gauge wire as you can manage. An interesting challenge might be to find acoustic measurements and consensus of blind listening tests to justify the use of heaviest gauge of internal wiring.
In similar designs that I’ve built, I run the wire - as thin as #24- in a direct line from the back of the enclosure, penetrating through all the fold panels, and sealing with hot glue or silicone. Of course, that means wiring before closing them up.
In similar designs that I’ve built, I run the wire - as thin as #24
- in a direct line from the back of the enclosure, penetrating through all the fold panels, and sealing with hot glue or silicone. Of course, that means wiring before closing them up.
FYI, in plumbing, where pressure/flow can be very obvious, it is common practice on long runs to size the long-run pipes bigger than the valves/fittings or final-foot pipe. There can be enough drag in 100 feet of pipe to make the drag of a sized-down valve insignificant. Likewise I am trending to cross-house runs in 1" PEX (to conserve the lowish pressure of an economic well-pump) while coming from floor to faucet with 1/2" PEX, and even with a foot of 3/8" flex.
So yeah. Use a foot of #16 at the end of your long #10.
FWIW, I see no big problem with soldering #10 to a speaker. I soldered #6 to slightly larger lugs last summer. Nearly gave myself heat-castration: used a 550W iron in July sunshine. Did not need so much heat; a 150W Weller gun would have been fine (but is lost). The other issue is not melting the speaker lug. Older ones are phenolic and fairly heat-tough. There's also the solder on the tinsel. So it may be frustrating for a less experienced solderer.
So yeah. Use a foot of #16 at the end of your long #10.
FWIW, I see no big problem with soldering #10 to a speaker. I soldered #6 to slightly larger lugs last summer. Nearly gave myself heat-castration: used a 550W iron in July sunshine. Did not need so much heat; a 150W Weller gun would have been fine (but is lost). The other issue is not melting the speaker lug. Older ones are phenolic and fairly heat-tough. There's also the solder on the tinsel. So it may be frustrating for a less experienced solderer.
A belated right on, wiring is sized based on voltage [water pressure] drop over distance and each connection [tap] point represents a closed loop due to its impedance mismatch, so wiring in the cab can be [much] smaller than speaker wire run and as Galu noted, an oversize wire for the tap point can be 'thinned' to match the smaller wire's connection requirements, though as rayma noted, needs some form of strain relief to ensure a stable connection against tugging, vibration.
Re soldering large wire directly to speaker drivers; since connections are a wiring system's weakest link, I'm a big fan of hard wiring the wire runs directly to the driver/XO as required, but all my main soldering work required > 1 kW, so while I got pretty adept up to a point there were times when I had to use an 'adapter' in the form of a short, smaller solid strand of magnet winding wire embedded/soldered to the big wire, which allowed me to just 'tap' the super hot iron on the [much] smaller solder point.
That said, recently I found out the hard way that even a 'quickie' was too much heat transfer on a modern circuit board.
GM
Re soldering large wire directly to speaker drivers; since connections are a wiring system's weakest link, I'm a big fan of hard wiring the wire runs directly to the driver/XO as required, but all my main soldering work required > 1 kW, so while I got pretty adept up to a point there were times when I had to use an 'adapter' in the form of a short, smaller solid strand of magnet winding wire embedded/soldered to the big wire, which allowed me to just 'tap' the super hot iron on the [much] smaller solder point.
That said, recently I found out the hard way that even a 'quickie' was too much heat transfer on a modern circuit board.
GM
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