Speaker wire advice please (1 Viewer)

[Iver]

Trevin:

The normal lighting wires and wire supplied with the receiver shown above do not have these problems.

http://home.earthlink.net/~rogerr7/wire.htm#alllowcost

 

[Iver]

Bob:

Several of the speaker sites recommend the following gauge based on run-length:

1-10 ft: 16 ga
11-20 ft: 14 ga
20+ ft: 12 ga

Could you post the links?


Crutchfield suggests these guidelines:

16 AWG -- 0 to 80 feet

14 AWG -- 80 to 200

12 AWG -- 200+

http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/S-...kers_wire.html


This is from Cambridge Soundworks:

"Improve the sound of your home audio equipment with quality 18-gauge speaker wire from Cambridge SoundWorks. For use with the most demanding and highest quality home theater systems; 100-foot length, choice of white or clear plastic jacket."

http://www.cambridgesoundworks.com/s...item=a118100zz


I prefer these guidelines, from McIntosh engineer Roger Russell, based on avoiding the use of a length of wire of a given gauge which will add more than 5% to the total resistance of the speaker circuit. Following this, the limit for 16 AWG, with an 8 Ohm speaker, is 50 feet (37 feet for a 6 Ohm speaker, 25 feet for a 4 Ohm, etc.):

http://home.earthlink.net/~rogerr7/wire.htm#wiretable


If a friend with 8 Ohm speakers asked me if they needed 12 AWG for an installation with no run over 30 feet, I would have to honestly tell them that there would be no functional difference between that and higher-gauge (i.e., less expensive) wire. An 8.2-Ohm speaker circuit is not going to work a whole lot differently than an 8.1 or 8.05-Ohm circuit. Telling them they need the higher priced wire in a situation where they don't is leading somebody to needlessly overspend.

 

[Trevin Chow]

Yes, that's an interesting excerpt. If you had gone on a couple of sentences further you would have reached another interesting quote:

"The normal lighting wires and wire supplied with the receiver shown above do not have these problems."

Iver: I don't understand your point. Is this not saying that the Homedepot wiring changed color while the wiring with teh receiver did not?

 

[Chu Gai]

Any wire that comes in contact with PVC will turn green over time. The rate at which this happens is determined by a mulitude of factors.
1) temperature
2) humidity
3) unreacted monomer in the PVC. in other words, vinyl chloride monomer
4) the amount and nature of the plasticizer that's put into the PVC to give it flexibility.
5) the color of the PVC. this is simply because the color affects light and UV absorption with serve to degrade PVC over time.

The nature of the copper, whether it's oxygen free, single crystal, whatever has no effect upon the rate at which this happens.

The color is specifically due to the formation of copper chloride and is a surface phenomena that only goes down a few microns. It has no effect upon the sound quality but the appearance is disconcerting. If you don't want it, then you've got a few options.

1) use a colored PVC, then you won't see it.
2) choose wire that has a different insulating material such as polyethylene or something that doesn't have the word 'chloride' in it. you'll pay a bit more for a different insulator.
3) have your wires covered with something like techflex
4) choose wire suitable for underground burial like they use for low voltage outdoor lights.
5) use silver over copper. now the silver still reacts with the chloride, but it's an off-white color so you really don't realize it's happened.

So long as your wire is of reasonable length, and the rogers link is an entirely reasonable one, then you're in good shape. Even if you were to use a gauge or two smaller than recommended, you're still in good shape from the point of audibility. You've got other factors that grossly dominate this such as the nature of your listening environment. It is far more of a challenge, but one with enormously long lasting benefits, to get one's speakers into a listener friendly position and then work at controlling the room acoustics. IOW, having a couple of people over, listening to your system, has a far more profound affect than whether you went 16 gauge rather than 12 gauge.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Tony,

...it's not hard for me to get a hold of surplus wire of pretty much any size... 4/0 AWG or bigger. From a complete audiophile point of view, would the reduced impedance affect sound quality at all, or would I start running into inductance problems?

Actually with that stuff I’d be more concerned about terminations than capacitance.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Iver]

Trevin:

Iver: I don't understand your point. Is this not saying that the Homedepot wiring changed color while the wiring with teh receiver did not?

Yes. That is what I wanted to point out. My feeling, and I should probably just e-mail the author of the site to try to get this clarified, is that what he describes as 33-cents-a-foot Home Depot wire was probably not what they currently sell as speaker wire (though the price is similar).

As Tyler said, the present Home Depot speaker wire is coded for polarity. It's hard to imagine anybody buying speaker wire that wasn't, unless they either didn't care about having their speakers in phase or they enjoyed spending time laying the wire out flat and making little + marks on it with an indelible pen to keep track of the positive side.

Or maybe it would be less work to mark the negative side

Anyway, I think most people just buy the speaker wire with tinting to keep track of the polarity.

This leads me to believe that Roger Russell, the author of the page linked to, did not purchase the same wire HD now sells as speaker wire. It may have even been lampcord (nothing technically wrong with that, but it may be hard to identify its gauge and it's not marked for polarity).

Also, I quoted the remainder of Russell's "All Cheap Speaker Wire is Not the Same" section to emphasize that he only had these oxidization problems with the one product from Home Depot (which he also mentions being sold at Lowes).

That is consistent with my own experience with speaker wire. I do not remember problems with oxidization in the past, though I have seen speaker wire after a long period of time (several years) become brittle and generally not something you want to keep using so that may be due to oxidization.

If there are any issues with speaker wire over a very long time wearing down due to oxidization from reacting to the PVC coating or from any other cause it does not cause me a lot of worry. My speaker wire runs are quite short and the wire I have now, which was $3 for a pre-cut 25-foot length, still looks brand new. If it gets gnarly looking five years down the road, replacing it won't entail inordinate financial pain.

 

[Chu Gai]

If it gets gnarly looking five years down the road, replacing it won't entail inordinate financial pain.

ain't that the truth.

 

[Bob McElfresh]

Could you post the links?

Heck. I tried to find the site (I'm on a different computer these days) and I cannot find it. I remember it being a fairly audiophile line of speakers and the web site included speaker setup diagrams without a lot of the "... you need to re-construct your room along a Golden Cubiod to get the best sound from our speakers" attitude. They had some fairly basic-but-solid suggestions about speaker placement and room acoustics.

Sorry, I cant find it anymore :frowning:

 

[Chu Gai]

you thinking of cardas' site?