speaker wire question (1 Viewer)

[Cloud]

So I'm getting ready to setup my new setup (just moved) and I didn't buy any speaker wire because i knew I had a ton of high quality 16awg left over from my last install at the old house that worked really well. Went to start hooking up the speakers and it turns out I only had about 10 feet left instead of the 100ft or so I thought I had. Now for my question: I have about 500ft left on a spool of 20awg wire, and I'm wondering if there will be any sort of sound quality loss or signal loss if I run 2 wires to each connection (instead of just one) to make up for the lack in size? Each wire will be the same size and length, I just don't know if there is anything to do with the signal splitting between the two wires that could cause a loss/distortion in sound.

 

[Robert_J]

Having multiple runs of speaker wire will do nothing to the sound quality. It will just lower the resistance. But two runs of 20ga are equal to 17ga based on the rule of thumb at the Wikipedia site.

-Robert

 

[chuckg]

I would opt for much thicker wire. 14 gauge is my minimum for any run of greater than six inches. Anything more than about half a foot, and I use 12 gauge.

 

[Allan Jayne]

Running multiple thinner wires instead of a single thick wire is probably only useful when you have a lot of the thinner wire you need to "get rid of". Electrically the results are the same for the same total wire cross sectional area.

Don't forget, it's more cumbersome and (cosmetically) less attractive.

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