Speaker Wire, Gauge, etc.

[SaturationPt]

<<snip>>No mister, music is not a continuos signal like the current flow in your ac. Music is a wery dynamic and transient signal. Wery. And the challenge here is not to reduce this transients.<<snip>>

Exactly my point. Even if you were to put a constant 100w through these mythical speakers in champ's story, you would never have enough heat to melt the wire insulation in free-air, and stories like this serve no purpose (IMO of course). That he closed his posting of mis-spelled words, bad punctuation, and lack of sentence structure with "learn to read" is also not constructive.

There have been a few postings here that are useful, some with actual facts and numbers, a couple of good articles. I prefer to err on the heavier side for a (wire) cost difference that will likely be only a couple of percent of the entire system's price so perhaps my bad for not understanding the argument a couple of people make to get by with as little as possible.

 

[ouimetnick]

Many theories on larger or smaller gauge wire. I'm not exactly quoting. Ohm Accoustics, long time USA manufacture of quality speakers, wrote on thier site that they designed thier speakers with 12 gauge wire in mind. Customers can deviate from that, larger or smaller, depending on length of runs.

Interesting condifering that their older speakers (D2, C2, Model I, etc) all use what looks to be 20 gauge wiring inside.

 

[Old Guy8]

Interesting condifering that their older speakers (D2, C2, Model I, etc) all use what looks to be 20 gauge wiring inside.

The C2's are 40 years old. The website was recent. Maybe their design parameters have changed over time. Also, internal wires are short runs. I can't speak for them. My Advents, have thin wire in them also.

 

[SoundsAlike]

If thicker = better performance would changing the gauge of a lamp's wiring make bulbs brighter or doing the same to a dryer make an electric dryer work faster? I doubt it

 

[Radkat]

If thicker = better performance would changing the gauge of a lamp's wiring make bulbs brighter or doing the same to a dryer make an electric dryer work faster? I doubt it

SoundsAlike - you must be referring to a 'balanced load' for the dryer! LOL

 

[woofmytweets]

If thicker = better performance would changing the gauge of a lamp's wiring make bulbs brighter or doing the same to a dryer make an electric dryer work faster? I doubt it

only to a point - while you can imagine putting wire that was so thin that it would melt or start a fire, which negatively affects one's electric dryer experience, increasing the wire thickness will only improve the situation to a point where the dryer is working at it's maximum potential.

my view, personally, on speaker wire, is to get a nice heavy gauge, make sure the connections are robust & clean, and keep the runs as short as possible (but equal length). I do spend a bit on my speaker wires, but they're by far the least expensive component in the system.

 

[Poultrygeist]

All excellent unless the metal banana plugs touch each other with the speaker wire connected and live on the amp. Then the amp may have problems, depends. I use dual banana plugs to avoid shorting out the bananas to each other for that very reason. I don't want to find out if my amps can handle a dead short.

or use banana plugs with non conductive plastic covers

 

[Blue Shadow]

or use banana plugs with non conductive plastic covers

That would be great but many must have fancy yellow metal fully visible on the banana plug. Ones with non-conductive grabs just aren't as pretty and we all know better looking sounds better even when not seen.