All About Speaker Wire
Ok, I'm very aware that I'm headed here into a topic with religiously held beliefs. This is speaker wire from an engineering perspective. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with any of the companies mentioned, and I don't get anything if you buy something.
Many people believe if you can hear it then it's real. But if you're an engineer there's also consideration of double blind testing and repeatability. For example tests of wine tasters have shown that they are inconsistent one tasting to the next, and in comparing cheap wines to expensive wines they're basically no better than a coin flip. People claim that some speaker wire makes their stereo sound better - more open, deeper stage, transparent, all kind of words that I don't know how to measure. Without question they feel this way, but engineering is not about feelings.
We're going to work with an imaginary stereo that has 4 ohm speakers. That's because 4 ohm speakers are more demanding. If we used 8 ohm speakers everything in this article would be 6dB better. Wire has resistance, and that resistance decouples the amplifier from the speakers. The amplifier must be closely coupled for most speakers due to inductive kickback from the woofers. You may have an amplifier with an output impedance of .001 ohm, but if your speaker wire is 1 ohm then in your system it's no better than a cheap 1950s tube amp.
We need to know something about the current requirements of speakers playing loud music. For most music, roughly speaking, the band from 200hz-2khz is 10dB down in power compared to the band from 20hz-200hz; and the band from 2khz - 20khz is down another 10dB. If you're running 200 watts through your 4 ohm speakers then you're using about 7 amps; almost all of that is in the 20hz-200hz band. Something like 2 amps is being used from 200hz-2khz, and something like .7 amps is being used in the 2khz-20khz band. These are average numbers for typical music - obviously you can get a synthesizer or signal generator and put as much energy as you wish anywhere you want. Normally a 2 amp fuse on your tweeters and a 5 amp fuse on your midrange will never come close to burning up, but will give you some piece of mind when your daughter's latest worthless boyfriend shows up with his "music." Remember, Nelson Pass says the first watt is the most critical, and indeed most listening happens using only a very few watts.
Here's the candidates for our speaker wire. We'll consider only stranded wire, only from 24 gauge to 9 gauge. Remarkably, some speaker wire is 24 gauge. If you get speaker wire that's doubled up 12 gauge - four 12 gauge wires, two each used on the positive and the negative speaker terminals, then effectively you have 9 gauge wire. Why do we use stranded wire? Solid core wire is not very flexible; 12 gauge solid core wire will not lay nicely on the carpet. Also, high frequency current in a wire flows on the surface of the wire after some frequency, which means the wire is low resistance at low frequencies then the resistance rises as the frequency rises. Stranded wire has more surface so this effect is minimized. The table below shows the frequency when a solid core wire would start to have a rising resistance. What we see is that solid core 20 gauge is the largest wire we can safely use.
In the table above we also see a column labeled "strands." Stranded wire is commonly available with several different strand counts; for example 12 gauge wire is commonly available with 1 strand (solid core), 49 strands, 63 strands, or 259 strands. One company, who actually makes quite good speaker wire, uses 259 strand wire and acts like they invented it; actually you can call up any cable manufacturing company and order up as much as you like. And fairly inexpensively if you're willing to buy a 1000 ft spool.
While we're here we'll note that wire gauges are like dB: 3 gauges is half the resistance. So if you double up 24 gauge wire you have 21 gauge; 18 gauge doubled up gets you 15 gauge; 12 gauge doubled up gets you 9 gauge.
Wire has stray capacitance, something the snake oil people like to make a big deal about. A typical run of 16 gauge wire will have capacitance of about ten pico farads per foot. Coupled to a 4 ohm speaker a 10 ft cable starts to act like a low pass filter at a couple hundred megahertz. Our speaker wire would make a bad FM transmission line, but it's just fine for audio.
Wire also has stray inductance, again something the snake oil people like to make a big deal about. A typical run of 16 gauge wire will have inductance of about .2 micro Henry per foot. Coupled to a 4 ohm speaker a 10 ft cable starts to act like a low pass filter at a couple hundred kilohertz. Our speaker wire would make a bad AM transmission line, but again it's just fine for audio. You can decrease the stray inductance by using a lot of small wires, like 20 22-gauge wires braided together to make the equivalent of a 12 gauge pair. This will cut the inductance roughly in half, perhaps lifting your cable frequency from 350khz to 700khz. I don't find this exciting or worth the work.
Let's presume we're driving 4 ohm speakers. These draw a lot of current and are relatively hard to drive, compared to 8 ohm speakers. The speaker wire acts like a resistor. If we want 90% of the amplifier voltage to appear across the speaker then the wire should have no more than .4 ohms. Remember, the speaker wire carries the current there and back, so a 10 foot run of cable is 20 feet of wire. We have to double the resistance figures in the table above, as we're using 20 feet of wire to make a 10 foot cable. Looking at our table that means we need 24 gauge wire for a 10 foot run. We could use 26 gauge wire for a 5 foot run. Since the speaker gets 90% of the amplifier power, the cable is using up 10% and the cable effects are 20dB down. Let's consider another factor of 10, so that 1% of the power is dissipated across the speaker wire. Now for a 10 foot run the wire must be under .04 ohms and we need 14 gauge wire. With 14 gauge wire the speaker cable effects are down by 40dB. So a decent argument can be made that your speaker wires should be good quality 12 or 14 gauge wire. Let's use another factor of 3 and require our wire to have no more than .013 ohms on a 10 foot run. This puts the wire effects down by 50dB. Apparently we need about 8 gauge wire to accomplish this.
What are these cable effects that concern us? First, obviously, any power dissipated in the wire is making the speakers quieter. The smallest volume change a human can reliably hear is about 1dB, and we're long past that point. So volume isn't it.
Woofers have a large voice coil, which is basically a large inductor. If you get current flowing in an inductor it will work hard to keep that current flowing just as it is. The ignition coils in your car are just large inductors; you get current flowing through them then cut out of the circuit. In their attempt to keep the current flowing the coils will have their voltage jump up almost instantaneously to over 20,000 volts; this is enough voltage to spark across a fair gap of air and that's what makes your spark plugs fire. Woofers aren't quite this dramatic, but a sudden change in the bass signal will have the woofer inductors send a voltage spike back up the speaker wires to the amplifier. This voltage spike must be absorbed and damped out by the power amp. The amp's output impedance tells you how good the amp will be at damping out this inductive kickback - lower is better. A vacuum tube amp will often have an output impedance of a significant fraction of an ohm, so vacuum tube amps struggle to damp out this signal. A good transistor amp will have an output impedance of something like .0001 ohm, so it appears the transistor amp is simply going to eat this kickback voltage right up. However, if your speaker cables are 24 gauge, they have a resistance of .25 ohms and your beautiful transistor amp is no better than a 1940s radio shack tube amp kit. And, by the way, for as long as your amp is damping out that inductive kickback it has decreased gain for all other signals, which means you're producing "transient intermodulation distortion." TIM is a fancy word that means your amp is busy doing something else and can't be bothered right now to make those cymbals sheen.
If you're using 14 gauge solid core wire, your high frequencies over 6700hz are going to be shredded by the wire. It makes no sense to get a beryllium tweeter good up to 35khz then have the speaker wire start cutting off the signal at 6.7khz.
If you have cheap speakers, then 18 gauge wire will have effects that are 30dB below the music. A good crossover tries to get the drivers 20dB down before they start messing up, so 30dB is perfectly adequate. If you carefully bought or built a good set of speakers and some decent electronics, then 16 gauge wire will put the speaker cable effects down by 34dB. It's hard to imagine you can hear this. If you spend a small fortune on Magnezapper 50.7i speakers and a Nelson Fail 2000 watt pure class A single ended Buddha amp, I would say the small added expense of using 12 gauge speaker cables and putting the cable effects down by 42dB are well worth it. Doubling up the 12 gauge wire puts the cable effects 49dB down. These dB numbers are all based on 4 ohm speakers. If you have 8 ohm speakers then 18 gauge is 36dB down, 16 gauge is 40dB down, 12 gauge is 48dB down, and 12 gauge doubled up is 54dB down.
You can use 16AWG speaker wire and you'll probably be just fine. You can get 50 feet of this on EBay for about $8. This will be just fine for most stereos, particularly for your brother-in-law's stereo. 12AWG wire is a step up which may improve your bass, as it will allow your amplifier better access to your woofer coils.
There are two exotic wires to consider. You can buy 100ft or 200ft of Silverback 12 gauge wire, 259 strands, at Amazon. $110 for 100 feet, which is five times as much as 49 strand wire, or $180 for 200 feet. Or for $860 you can get 500 feet of Belden 1313a 10 gauge speaker wire. I don't know why you would buy the Belden. Standard banana plugs will take 12 gauge wire; if you want to use 10 gauge wire or doubled up 12 gauge wire, you'll need banana jacks with oversized wire connections, available at Parts-Express.com for $10/pair, ten times the price of the Nakamichis. But the Parts-Express jacks have carbon fiber shells and look very cool.
Longer speaker wires are not as good. It's better to get some 2 meter or 3 meter RCA wires, put your power amp half way between your speakers, and use 5 foot to 7 foot speaker wire, rather than have to use 10 foot or 12 foot speaker wire.
How long do your cables last? I have some 12 gauge speaker wire that's 40 years old and it now looks greenish through the clear insulation - a clear sign that air and water vapor have gotten in there over the years and corroded the copper. And that 40 years was spent in the People's Republic of California. 40 years in Florida would have been much harder on the cables due to the humidity. My 40 year old wire still works, but it will not measure out as well as a nice new piece of 12 gauge oxygen-free wire. An unfortunate fact of stranded wire is that it's never really completely sealed. I think it's noteworthy that the inexpensive speaker wire at Walmart has a transparent coating, but all the expensive wires do not, so you can't easily tell if your wire is corroding. Since most of the expensive speaker wires have a lifetime warranty perhaps it does not behoove the manufacturer to let you easily see how your $10,000 cables are aging.
If you want excellent speaker wires at a reasonable cost, I recommend you build your own. There are several good youtube videos showing you in detail how to make these for about $3 per meter. You can buy 12 gauge speaker wire on EBay, about $20 for 100 feet. Nakamichi banana jacks can be had for just over a dollar per pair on EBay. Heat shrink tubing will cost you about $8 on Ebay. Braided sleeving is about $10-$15 for 100 feet at Amazon. You'll need a heat gun, or to borrow your wife's blow dryer. A couple runs of speaker wire will take you about an hour to assemble. Make sure you get banana plugs that have two set screws - the lower set screw tightens against the insulated wire to hold the wire in place, the upper set screw tightens against the bare wire to make a good electrical connection. If you don't want to do all the work of buying, assembling and heating various strange pieces, you can buy very nice cables on Amazon very reasonably. I particularly recommend the AmazonBasics cable, a nice 16 gauge cable for about $15 - $25 per pair; or the Sewell Silverback cables, an extremely nice 12 gauge cable for about $30-$45 per pair. If some Wall Street hedge fund manager tells you your cables are cheap and don't measure up, remind him that he'll have all eternity in hell to ponder his superior $$$$ cables.
Or go on EBay and get a pair of Schwartznegger Extreme 20,000 cables, $13000 pre-owned in excellent condition. $17,000 off MSRP! Just search for "Speaker Cables," choose sort / price highest to lowest, and they'll pop right up. While you're at it be sure to pick up a few $800 bottles of wine; I'm sure your new $13,000 cables will only sound better when you're two sheets to the wind. This is a stunning bargain for some wire that's so advanced even quantum physicists don't understand how it works. Remember to be careful to get the cable direction correct: even though music is alternating current and everything that goes out comes back a couple milliseconds later, still, the "music" has a direction. Curiously, people without an electrical background just assume the current comes out the + side and goes back the - side. This is a left over from before we knew about atoms and electrons. In fact the electrons carry the current, and they come out the - side and go back the + side, the exact opposite of what you might think. By the way, any decent physicist will tell you that the Poynting vector assures us that the energy and the music information aren't flowing through the wire, but rather through the empty space between the wires. I can't wait until some Nigerian Prince finds out about this and produces intra-cable relativistic energy transmission impedance matching foam with quantum entangled neutrino flux suppression. It's those darn quantum entangled neutrinos that are dulling our stereo experience.
Or maybe it's dark matter.
For the record, I would like to point out that CERN, the guys who found the Higgs particle, just use plain old wire. They calculate carefully to make sure their huge superconductor magnets spread out over several square miles have plenty of current, but they manage to do this without spectacular $4,000 per meter cable. The Antarctic neutrino observatory is recording signals from several thousand very delicate detectors spread out over several kilometers, watching carefully for about a dozen tiny flashes of light per year, and they too manage to do it without mysterious Schwartznegger Extreme 20,000 cables, $10,000 per meter. The Hubble telescope has been operating in a complete vacuum with temperatures that range from -150° to 250° and has managed to send home 30 years of spectacular pictures using only normal wire. Only home stereos, particularly those in Beverly Hills mansions and Manhattan townhouses, seem to require oxygen free single crystal 1800 strand 6AWG braided unobtainium wire bathed in filtered refrigerated and recirculated pure virgin snake oil to faithfully transmit a digitally restored 1929 recording of Duke Ellington.
Recipes:
Good cables, about $25 for a 12 foot pair:
Better cables, about $30 for a 12 foot pair:
The best cables I know how to make, about $85 for a 12 foot pair:
Sources:
web page, "thing to search for".
Ok, I'm very aware that I'm headed here into a topic with religiously held beliefs. This is speaker wire from an engineering perspective. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with any of the companies mentioned, and I don't get anything if you buy something.
Many people believe if you can hear it then it's real. But if you're an engineer there's also consideration of double blind testing and repeatability. For example tests of wine tasters have shown that they are inconsistent one tasting to the next, and in comparing cheap wines to expensive wines they're basically no better than a coin flip. People claim that some speaker wire makes their stereo sound better - more open, deeper stage, transparent, all kind of words that I don't know how to measure. Without question they feel this way, but engineering is not about feelings.
We're going to work with an imaginary stereo that has 4 ohm speakers. That's because 4 ohm speakers are more demanding. If we used 8 ohm speakers everything in this article would be 6dB better. Wire has resistance, and that resistance decouples the amplifier from the speakers. The amplifier must be closely coupled for most speakers due to inductive kickback from the woofers. You may have an amplifier with an output impedance of .001 ohm, but if your speaker wire is 1 ohm then in your system it's no better than a cheap 1950s tube amp.
We need to know something about the current requirements of speakers playing loud music. For most music, roughly speaking, the band from 200hz-2khz is 10dB down in power compared to the band from 20hz-200hz; and the band from 2khz - 20khz is down another 10dB. If you're running 200 watts through your 4 ohm speakers then you're using about 7 amps; almost all of that is in the 20hz-200hz band. Something like 2 amps is being used from 200hz-2khz, and something like .7 amps is being used in the 2khz-20khz band. These are average numbers for typical music - obviously you can get a synthesizer or signal generator and put as much energy as you wish anywhere you want. Normally a 2 amp fuse on your tweeters and a 5 amp fuse on your midrange will never come close to burning up, but will give you some piece of mind when your daughter's latest worthless boyfriend shows up with his "music." Remember, Nelson Pass says the first watt is the most critical, and indeed most listening happens using only a very few watts.
Here's the candidates for our speaker wire. We'll consider only stranded wire, only from 24 gauge to 9 gauge. Remarkably, some speaker wire is 24 gauge. If you get speaker wire that's doubled up 12 gauge - four 12 gauge wires, two each used on the positive and the negative speaker terminals, then effectively you have 9 gauge wire. Why do we use stranded wire? Solid core wire is not very flexible; 12 gauge solid core wire will not lay nicely on the carpet. Also, high frequency current in a wire flows on the surface of the wire after some frequency, which means the wire is low resistance at low frequencies then the resistance rises as the frequency rises. Stranded wire has more surface so this effect is minimized. The table below shows the frequency when a solid core wire would start to have a rising resistance. What we see is that solid core 20 gauge is the largest wire we can safely use.
In the table above we also see a column labeled "strands." Stranded wire is commonly available with several different strand counts; for example 12 gauge wire is commonly available with 1 strand (solid core), 49 strands, 63 strands, or 259 strands. One company, who actually makes quite good speaker wire, uses 259 strand wire and acts like they invented it; actually you can call up any cable manufacturing company and order up as much as you like. And fairly inexpensively if you're willing to buy a 1000 ft spool.
While we're here we'll note that wire gauges are like dB: 3 gauges is half the resistance. So if you double up 24 gauge wire you have 21 gauge; 18 gauge doubled up gets you 15 gauge; 12 gauge doubled up gets you 9 gauge.
Wire has stray capacitance, something the snake oil people like to make a big deal about. A typical run of 16 gauge wire will have capacitance of about ten pico farads per foot. Coupled to a 4 ohm speaker a 10 ft cable starts to act like a low pass filter at a couple hundred megahertz. Our speaker wire would make a bad FM transmission line, but it's just fine for audio.
Wire also has stray inductance, again something the snake oil people like to make a big deal about. A typical run of 16 gauge wire will have inductance of about .2 micro Henry per foot. Coupled to a 4 ohm speaker a 10 ft cable starts to act like a low pass filter at a couple hundred kilohertz. Our speaker wire would make a bad AM transmission line, but again it's just fine for audio. You can decrease the stray inductance by using a lot of small wires, like 20 22-gauge wires braided together to make the equivalent of a 12 gauge pair. This will cut the inductance roughly in half, perhaps lifting your cable frequency from 350khz to 700khz. I don't find this exciting or worth the work.
Let's presume we're driving 4 ohm speakers. These draw a lot of current and are relatively hard to drive, compared to 8 ohm speakers. The speaker wire acts like a resistor. If we want 90% of the amplifier voltage to appear across the speaker then the wire should have no more than .4 ohms. Remember, the speaker wire carries the current there and back, so a 10 foot run of cable is 20 feet of wire. We have to double the resistance figures in the table above, as we're using 20 feet of wire to make a 10 foot cable. Looking at our table that means we need 24 gauge wire for a 10 foot run. We could use 26 gauge wire for a 5 foot run. Since the speaker gets 90% of the amplifier power, the cable is using up 10% and the cable effects are 20dB down. Let's consider another factor of 10, so that 1% of the power is dissipated across the speaker wire. Now for a 10 foot run the wire must be under .04 ohms and we need 14 gauge wire. With 14 gauge wire the speaker cable effects are down by 40dB. So a decent argument can be made that your speaker wires should be good quality 12 or 14 gauge wire. Let's use another factor of 3 and require our wire to have no more than .013 ohms on a 10 foot run. This puts the wire effects down by 50dB. Apparently we need about 8 gauge wire to accomplish this.
What are these cable effects that concern us? First, obviously, any power dissipated in the wire is making the speakers quieter. The smallest volume change a human can reliably hear is about 1dB, and we're long past that point. So volume isn't it.
Woofers have a large voice coil, which is basically a large inductor. If you get current flowing in an inductor it will work hard to keep that current flowing just as it is. The ignition coils in your car are just large inductors; you get current flowing through them then cut out of the circuit. In their attempt to keep the current flowing the coils will have their voltage jump up almost instantaneously to over 20,000 volts; this is enough voltage to spark across a fair gap of air and that's what makes your spark plugs fire. Woofers aren't quite this dramatic, but a sudden change in the bass signal will have the woofer inductors send a voltage spike back up the speaker wires to the amplifier. This voltage spike must be absorbed and damped out by the power amp. The amp's output impedance tells you how good the amp will be at damping out this inductive kickback - lower is better. A vacuum tube amp will often have an output impedance of a significant fraction of an ohm, so vacuum tube amps struggle to damp out this signal. A good transistor amp will have an output impedance of something like .0001 ohm, so it appears the transistor amp is simply going to eat this kickback voltage right up. However, if your speaker cables are 24 gauge, they have a resistance of .25 ohms and your beautiful transistor amp is no better than a 1940s radio shack tube amp kit. And, by the way, for as long as your amp is damping out that inductive kickback it has decreased gain for all other signals, which means you're producing "transient intermodulation distortion." TIM is a fancy word that means your amp is busy doing something else and can't be bothered right now to make those cymbals sheen.
If you're using 14 gauge solid core wire, your high frequencies over 6700hz are going to be shredded by the wire. It makes no sense to get a beryllium tweeter good up to 35khz then have the speaker wire start cutting off the signal at 6.7khz.
If you have cheap speakers, then 18 gauge wire will have effects that are 30dB below the music. A good crossover tries to get the drivers 20dB down before they start messing up, so 30dB is perfectly adequate. If you carefully bought or built a good set of speakers and some decent electronics, then 16 gauge wire will put the speaker cable effects down by 34dB. It's hard to imagine you can hear this. If you spend a small fortune on Magnezapper 50.7i speakers and a Nelson Fail 2000 watt pure class A single ended Buddha amp, I would say the small added expense of using 12 gauge speaker cables and putting the cable effects down by 42dB are well worth it. Doubling up the 12 gauge wire puts the cable effects 49dB down. These dB numbers are all based on 4 ohm speakers. If you have 8 ohm speakers then 18 gauge is 36dB down, 16 gauge is 40dB down, 12 gauge is 48dB down, and 12 gauge doubled up is 54dB down.
You can use 16AWG speaker wire and you'll probably be just fine. You can get 50 feet of this on EBay for about $8. This will be just fine for most stereos, particularly for your brother-in-law's stereo. 12AWG wire is a step up which may improve your bass, as it will allow your amplifier better access to your woofer coils.
There are two exotic wires to consider. You can buy 100ft or 200ft of Silverback 12 gauge wire, 259 strands, at Amazon. $110 for 100 feet, which is five times as much as 49 strand wire, or $180 for 200 feet. Or for $860 you can get 500 feet of Belden 1313a 10 gauge speaker wire. I don't know why you would buy the Belden. Standard banana plugs will take 12 gauge wire; if you want to use 10 gauge wire or doubled up 12 gauge wire, you'll need banana jacks with oversized wire connections, available at Parts-Express.com for $10/pair, ten times the price of the Nakamichis. But the Parts-Express jacks have carbon fiber shells and look very cool.
Longer speaker wires are not as good. It's better to get some 2 meter or 3 meter RCA wires, put your power amp half way between your speakers, and use 5 foot to 7 foot speaker wire, rather than have to use 10 foot or 12 foot speaker wire.
How long do your cables last? I have some 12 gauge speaker wire that's 40 years old and it now looks greenish through the clear insulation - a clear sign that air and water vapor have gotten in there over the years and corroded the copper. And that 40 years was spent in the People's Republic of California. 40 years in Florida would have been much harder on the cables due to the humidity. My 40 year old wire still works, but it will not measure out as well as a nice new piece of 12 gauge oxygen-free wire. An unfortunate fact of stranded wire is that it's never really completely sealed. I think it's noteworthy that the inexpensive speaker wire at Walmart has a transparent coating, but all the expensive wires do not, so you can't easily tell if your wire is corroding. Since most of the expensive speaker wires have a lifetime warranty perhaps it does not behoove the manufacturer to let you easily see how your $10,000 cables are aging.
If you want excellent speaker wires at a reasonable cost, I recommend you build your own. There are several good youtube videos showing you in detail how to make these for about $3 per meter. You can buy 12 gauge speaker wire on EBay, about $20 for 100 feet. Nakamichi banana jacks can be had for just over a dollar per pair on EBay. Heat shrink tubing will cost you about $8 on Ebay. Braided sleeving is about $10-$15 for 100 feet at Amazon. You'll need a heat gun, or to borrow your wife's blow dryer. A couple runs of speaker wire will take you about an hour to assemble. Make sure you get banana plugs that have two set screws - the lower set screw tightens against the insulated wire to hold the wire in place, the upper set screw tightens against the bare wire to make a good electrical connection. If you don't want to do all the work of buying, assembling and heating various strange pieces, you can buy very nice cables on Amazon very reasonably. I particularly recommend the AmazonBasics cable, a nice 16 gauge cable for about $15 - $25 per pair; or the Sewell Silverback cables, an extremely nice 12 gauge cable for about $30-$45 per pair. If some Wall Street hedge fund manager tells you your cables are cheap and don't measure up, remind him that he'll have all eternity in hell to ponder his superior $$$$ cables.
Or go on EBay and get a pair of Schwartznegger Extreme 20,000 cables, $13000 pre-owned in excellent condition. $17,000 off MSRP! Just search for "Speaker Cables," choose sort / price highest to lowest, and they'll pop right up. While you're at it be sure to pick up a few $800 bottles of wine; I'm sure your new $13,000 cables will only sound better when you're two sheets to the wind. This is a stunning bargain for some wire that's so advanced even quantum physicists don't understand how it works. Remember to be careful to get the cable direction correct: even though music is alternating current and everything that goes out comes back a couple milliseconds later, still, the "music" has a direction. Curiously, people without an electrical background just assume the current comes out the + side and goes back the - side. This is a left over from before we knew about atoms and electrons. In fact the electrons carry the current, and they come out the - side and go back the + side, the exact opposite of what you might think. By the way, any decent physicist will tell you that the Poynting vector assures us that the energy and the music information aren't flowing through the wire, but rather through the empty space between the wires. I can't wait until some Nigerian Prince finds out about this and produces intra-cable relativistic energy transmission impedance matching foam with quantum entangled neutrino flux suppression. It's those darn quantum entangled neutrinos that are dulling our stereo experience.
Or maybe it's dark matter.
For the record, I would like to point out that CERN, the guys who found the Higgs particle, just use plain old wire. They calculate carefully to make sure their huge superconductor magnets spread out over several square miles have plenty of current, but they manage to do this without spectacular $4,000 per meter cable. The Antarctic neutrino observatory is recording signals from several thousand very delicate detectors spread out over several kilometers, watching carefully for about a dozen tiny flashes of light per year, and they too manage to do it without mysterious Schwartznegger Extreme 20,000 cables, $10,000 per meter. The Hubble telescope has been operating in a complete vacuum with temperatures that range from -150° to 250° and has managed to send home 30 years of spectacular pictures using only normal wire. Only home stereos, particularly those in Beverly Hills mansions and Manhattan townhouses, seem to require oxygen free single crystal 1800 strand 6AWG braided unobtainium wire bathed in filtered refrigerated and recirculated pure virgin snake oil to faithfully transmit a digitally restored 1929 recording of Duke Ellington.
Recipes:
Good cables, about $25 for a 12 foot pair:
- Ebay 16 gauge or 14 gauge speaker wire
- Ebay Nakamichi banana jacks
- Amazon 1/4" Braided sleeving
- Ebay various heat shrink tubing
- Or buy AmazonBasic cables, about $25 / pair.
Better cables, about $30 for a 12 foot pair:
- Ebay 12 gauge speaker wire
- Ebay Nakamichi banana jacks
- Amazon 3/8" Braided sleeving
- Ebay various heat shrink tubing
- Or buy (Amazon):
- Aurum cables, about $25/pair
- GearlT cables, about $35/pair
- HannLinte cables, about $20/pair - $45/pair
- KK ZB cables, about $55/pair
- MediaBridge cables, about $45/pair
- Silverback cables, about $45/pair.
- TNP cables, about $40/pair
The best cables I know how to make, about $85 for a 12 foot pair:
- Ebay 12 gauge 4 conductor wire
- Parts Express #091-3612 carbon fiber banana jacks
- Amazon 5/8" Braided sleeving
- Ebay various heat shrink tubing
- Parts Express #082-784 cable pants
- Or buy (Ebay):
- Legend cables 9 gauge, about $100/pair
- Lycable 10 gauge 504 strand, about $90/pair
Sources:
web page, "thing to search for".
- Ebay.com, "16awg speaker wire". You'll need 25ft - 100ft, depending.
- Ebay.com, "12awg speaker wire". You'll need 25ft - 100ft, depending.
- Ebay.com, "12awg 4 conductor wire". You'll need 25ft - 100ft, depending.
- Amazon.com, "braided cable sleeving". Available in several designer colors. Buy them all and have a rainbow stereo for when your granddaughter visits. Also put unicorn stickers on your grill cloth.
- Ebay.com, "Heat Shrink Tubing". You'll need a couple feet each of 3mm, 5mm, 9mm and 12mm tubing, perhaps in red and black.
- Ebay.com, "nakamachi banana gold". They come in sets, red and black paired up.
- Ebay.com, "nakamachi fork gold". They come in sets, red and black paired up.
- Ebay.com, "nakamachi pin gold". They come in sets, red and black paired up.
- parts-express.com, "nine tine banana". You need these if you want to double up 12 gauge wire. Splurge and get the carbon fiber version, they're much sexier. Be happy while you're alive, for you're a long time dead.
- Ebay.com, "cable pants". I don't use these, but perhaps you would like to.
- parts-express.com, "cable pants".
- Ebay.com, "hook loop strap". Tie up your cables into nice pretty loops. Don't let the back of your stereo look like the snake pit in Indiana Jones.
- Amazon.com, "AmazonBasics Speaker Cable Gold". 16 gauge cables, about $18/pair.
- Amazon.com, "Aurum cables", 12 gauge cables, about $25/pair
- Amazon.com, "GearlT cables", 12 gauge cables, about $35/pair
- Amazon.com, "HannLinte cables", 12 gauge cables, about $20/pair - $45/pair
- Amazon.com, "KK ZB cables", 12 gauge cables, about $55/pair
- Amazon.com, "MediaBridge cables", 12 gauge cables, about $45/pair
- Amazon.com, "Silverback cables", 12 gauge cables, about $45/pair.
- Amazon.com, "TNP cables", 12 gauge cables, about $40/pair
- Ebay.com, "Legend cables" 9 gauge cables, about $100/pair
- Ebay.com, "Lycable red" 10 gauge cables 504 strand, about $90/pair
- Amazon.com, "Silverback Speaker Wire", 12 gauge wire, 259 strands, 100 feet, $110.
- Amazon.com, "belden 1313a", 10 gauge wire, 500 feet, $850.
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> If you're using 14 gauge solid core wire, your high frequencies over 6700hz are going to be shredded by the wire.
SHREDDED!!
Um, a large wire can have SO low resistance, that even with Skin Effect, the resistance is still PLENTY low for any audio purpose.
And skin effect is not much smaller on stranded wire.
And nearly all speakers have rising impedance at the top of the audio band (find some graphs). This actually neatly "cancels" skin effect; also inductance, for any run of wire we would use in a home.
SHREDDED!!
Um, a large wire can have SO low resistance, that even with Skin Effect, the resistance is still PLENTY low for any audio purpose.
And skin effect is not much smaller on stranded wire.
And nearly all speakers have rising impedance at the top of the audio band (find some graphs). This actually neatly "cancels" skin effect; also inductance, for any run of wire we would use in a home.
Looks like an advertorial to me.
Wonder how much kickback he gets from anybody clicking on any of this spam
This seems doubtful, the links are to the main sites (http://ebay.com, Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more) and "12awg speaker wire" looks generic enough, and the links I'm seeing are even cheaper than the 50 cents a foot or so that I've paid at Home Depot and Lowes for equivalent "12awg landscape wire" (and who was it that told me even 12awg is overkill).
It's possible the OP has a (financial) connection with one of the higher cost brand names mentioned, but even that seems doubtful. This would be a horrible hit-or-miss way of spamming.
It's possible the OP has a (financial) connection with one of the higher cost brand names mentioned, but even that seems doubtful. This would be a horrible hit-or-miss way of spamming.
Looks like an advertorial to me.
Wonder how much kickback he gets from anybody clicking on any of this spam
Well, you've called me a spammer and a liar in one post. Good work.
I manufacture motorcycle windshields for a living. California Scientific Motorcycle Windshields
I have a challenge for you: find a single clickable link in my post.
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One thing missing in these posts - thankyou marklawrence for your thoughts on speaker cables. Thanks Mark.
I found it helpful. I am getting bass run-on from my Penaudio Serenades when connected to the ACA's. Your post has given me things to think about regards that. They are brilliant little amps, and luckily work well with my home made speakers.
Also, regards your post - I have been annoyed that there was no direct relation between price and sound quality, in my speaker cable collection. I am now inspired to make a few new pairs. In my honest opinion ears are the best judge, but/and if you've got the money, why not try everything? Could be fun. For me, somewhere out there is an ACA of speaker cables.
I found it helpful. I am getting bass run-on from my Penaudio Serenades when connected to the ACA's. Your post has given me things to think about regards that. They are brilliant little amps, and luckily work well with my home made speakers.
Also, regards your post - I have been annoyed that there was no direct relation between price and sound quality, in my speaker cable collection. I am now inspired to make a few new pairs. In my honest opinion ears are the best judge, but/and if you've got the money, why not try everything? Could be fun. For me, somewhere out there is an ACA of speaker cables.
A very good explanation Marklawrence but you forgot something......
These explanations only apply to well-designed amplifiers (from an engineering point of view) because some "audiophile amplifiers" will have problems with some types of cables.
Some will complain that the new cables will lose details for example, but it will only be a more accurate reproduction of the program due to the lack of ringing that appears on some expensive and poorly designed cables combined with poorly designed amplifiers (as are many audiophile amplifiers) and perceived as "details" by the ear of audiophiles.
These explanations only apply to well-designed amplifiers (from an engineering point of view) because some "audiophile amplifiers" will have problems with some types of cables.
Some will complain that the new cables will lose details for example, but it will only be a more accurate reproduction of the program due to the lack of ringing that appears on some expensive and poorly designed cables combined with poorly designed amplifiers (as are many audiophile amplifiers) and perceived as "details" by the ear of audiophiles.
A really well-educated physicist will know that the Poynting vector allows you to calculate the net energy flow through any closed surface, by doing a surface integral. It does not necessarily tell you how the energy got there.Marklawrence said:
I am always puzzled by new people who turn up on a website and immediately start posting 'tutorials'. If I met a new group of people I would wait a while and get to know them before impressing them with my wisdom.
Yes, but what about those who use their ears and eyes when evaluating their sound system, then post claims about how it sounds?
Yeah, why not try everything that matters such as speakers and room acoustics? Could be real gain.
And now for something completely different.
"Speaker wires don't matter if you use current drive."
I forget where I saw that quote.
Or Kelvin connection.
Kelvin Connections To Speakers
From the bar.
"Speaker wires don't matter if you use current drive."
I forget where I saw that quote.
Or Kelvin connection.
Kelvin Connections To Speakers
From the bar.
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The caveat is that the speaker needs to have a flat impedance curve to have “flat” response. With so many speakers designed with little care about impedance it is hard, but not impossible, to find such a speaker.
It can work really well.
dave
>> ...if you use current drive."
> The caveat is that the speaker needs to have a flat impedance curve to have “flat” response.
Not for-sure.
The other trick is to compensate the rise at resonance with another loss. Millions of tube radios (from table to console) used high-Z pentodes with open-back cabinets. The cabinet loss (also OT loss) roughly compensated the resonance rise. Several killer tube guitar amps are on this path. Open-back ventilates the tubes, can improve total bass output, increases midbass "throw". (To be fair: many of the Fenders were neither hi- nor lo-Z, but "roughly matched" with a trace of NFB. However Ampeg VT40 is very hi-Z out, the speakers boom up close, but cabinet loss partly cancels that a few feet out.)
The idea that "current moves speakers" is incomplete. Study theory of simple motors. The coil *speed* is set by Voltage. In most of a speaker's range, "cone speed is SPL". If the peak speed is speed of sound we have 190dB SPL at the cone. We never reach that, but SPL is proportional at lower voltages and speeds. So at this level of theory we want constant voltage. Practical matters like suspension, box size, and inductance get in the way of this simplicity.
A speaker system "can" be designed either way (or for finite Z). Lo-Z drive and moving-coil cones of modest size are generally the simplest to get working OK. Hi-Z drive requires different thinking and careful choices.
> The caveat is that the speaker needs to have a flat impedance curve to have “flat” response.
Not for-sure.
The other trick is to compensate the rise at resonance with another loss. Millions of tube radios (from table to console) used high-Z pentodes with open-back cabinets. The cabinet loss (also OT loss) roughly compensated the resonance rise. Several killer tube guitar amps are on this path. Open-back ventilates the tubes, can improve total bass output, increases midbass "throw". (To be fair: many of the Fenders were neither hi- nor lo-Z, but "roughly matched" with a trace of NFB. However Ampeg VT40 is very hi-Z out, the speakers boom up close, but cabinet loss partly cancels that a few feet out.)
The idea that "current moves speakers" is incomplete. Study theory of simple motors. The coil *speed* is set by Voltage. In most of a speaker's range, "cone speed is SPL". If the peak speed is speed of sound we have 190dB SPL at the cone. We never reach that, but SPL is proportional at lower voltages and speeds. So at this level of theory we want constant voltage. Practical matters like suspension, box size, and inductance get in the way of this simplicity.
A speaker system "can" be designed either way (or for finite Z). Lo-Z drive and moving-coil cones of modest size are generally the simplest to get working OK. Hi-Z drive requires different thinking and careful choices.
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