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Speaker Wire Lengths

Thrift-a-holic

Thrift-a-holic

Hooked for life
I was wondering how much effect the lenght of speaker wire has on the quality of sound. My spacific situation is, I have a set of 4ohm small advents hooked to my Kenwood KR-7600. I have a relativley small listening space, and route my wire under an area to the oppisite end of my room. One of my the lenghts of 14 AWG wire is about 20 feet long, and the other is about 25. That is not big deal right? I normally try to keep the lengths the same, to keep things nice and tidy, I just cut them to the necassary length. Also how musch wire is too much? I would think 25 feet of quality wire would not hinder sound quality, but maybe it does?
 
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I used two B&W DM2's wired in parallel (for each channel) which gave 4 Ohm nominal impedance. I was surprized, using 5 amp mains cord, how much power I lost in the wire. Room is not very big.

What I did (as I had more DM2's) was to use four per channel wired in series parallel to give 8 Ohm nominal impedance.

I suppose that the scientific way is to measure or calculate the resistance of what you are using.
 
Wire gauge comes into play more when we're discussing longer runs (>50 feet, YMMV though)

I like this link http://www.bcae1.com/dampfact.htm (bottom of the page) just to get an average idea of the losses in the wiring of one's system....damping factor can be affected quite easily, although this is not the only thing to consider. For example, the calculator does NOT take wire inductance or capacitance into effect, really.
 
I wouldn't worry about the 5 foot difference too much but I would think 25 feet is approaching the maximum run for 14 gauge.
 
http://www.av-outlet.com/en-us/dept_216.html

I always make my speaker cables the same length. The relative merits of that are debatable but it makes me feel better (OCD's). As far as the gauge goes see the link above. Most installers (HT) use 16 or 14 ga speaker wire. The best installer I know uses 16 ga Liberty cable. He doesn't even carry a 14 ga cable. He uses 12ga for 2 channel because it sounds better.
 
As a general rule, would it be correct to say, that with a 4ohm speaker like the small advents, the heavier the wire the better. For example 12awg is better than 16awg.
 
Thrift-a-holic said:
As a general rule, would it be correct to say, that with a 4ohm speaker like the small advents, the heavier the wire the better. For example 12awg is better than 16awg.
Click to expand...

I use a good quality 14 ga with my 4 ohm speakers. Try different gauges of the same brand of speaker wire. It's a fun experiment, most folks I've tried it with hear differences. It's a way to tailor the sound just a bit. For my Epos speakers I find that the 12 ga takes just a bit too much of the drive away from the speakers and 16 ga is a just a bit lean...that's how I settled on 14 ga....YMMV.
 
If your left speaker wire was wrapped seven times around the earth's equator plus three feet,

and your right speker wire was three feet,

then you'd hear the sound out of the left speaker about a second later than the sound out of your right speaker
 
Let's do the engineering (or physics, if you prefer). Electricity moves at 186,000 miles per second, or 9.8E8 feet per second. That means that your extra 5 foot of speaker length to that one speaker is gonna receive its AC signal 2E-8 (that's 0.00000002) seconds later than the other. Now lets consider that the highest frequency that the human ear can hear is 20,000 Hz, or cycles per second. That means that one (tweeter) speaker will be sending out its impulse a maximum of 2E-8/20,000 or 0.00982 seconds out of sequence from the other.

But here's the real kicker. Sound only moves through air at sea level at 760 miles per hour, or 1,114 feet per second. If you're sitting 15 feet from your speakers, that means the sound is taking 0.074 seconds to reach your ears, more than 10X the MAXIMUM sound wave separation of the highest tweeter sounds from the two speakers, not to mention the much longer intervals the mid and low range impulses are taking to reach you.

Whew. The long and short of it - don't sweat it. You cannot and will not hear any difference. Worry about something else.
 
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