wmoore: It's the thickness of the wire that matters. A coat hanger would be better than say bell wire to connect speaker, because it is thicker

grant_k:

wmoore: It's the thickness of the wire that matters. A coat hanger would be better than say bell wire to connect speaker, because it is thicker

Ah NO, not really...

Bell wire is made of Copper whereas a Coat Hanger is made of galvanised Steel. Copper has much lower resistance than steel and it also doesn't rust. Low Resistance is the most important factor when you are choosing speaker cable because speakers are typically of very low impedance, usually 4, 8 or 16 ohms.

If you have a steel coathanger with appreciable resistance, it will cause significant losses when you crank up the volume, and it will also mess up the Damping Factor for your Sub-woofer. Copper wires are always preferable for audio cable although they do use Aluminium cable now for mains distribution. The resistivity of Aluminium is 2.65 to 2.82 × 10-8 Ω·m whereas Copper is 1.678 × 10-8 Ω·m or around 39% lower.

wmoore: Yes Grant you are indeed correct. I should i mentioned about copper. But any copper wire thicker than thin bell wire is better...correct ?

grant_k:

wmoore: Yes Grant you are indeed correct. I should i mentioned about copper. But any copper wire thicker than thin bell wire is better...correct ?

Yes, definitely

The thicker the better within reason. But try to avoid solid-conductor cable, it's best to choose stranded because:

- It is less likely to fatigue and eventually break when moved repeatedly
- The impedance of stranded cable is lower at audio frequencies than solid conductor IIRC???

Cyril7 may be able to confirm that last point, but I seem to remember it from university days.

I also agree with Radiotron's comment about solder. My preferred method of termination for speaker cables is banana plugs and a soldering iron. Last time I wired up some speaker outlets, I couldn't find any banana plug mechs so I used RCA connectors instead. Not ideal, but it did the job for remote extension speakers and also the rear speakers in our lounge where not so much power is being delivered. For front & centre speakers it's best to hook them up directly if you can, with no connectors at all.

Guess Monster cables will be suing someone over this just like they did with companies with the word Monster in their name.

Of course for long runs you would never use coat hangers  but #8 fencing wire..

stuzzo: The physics of electrical current in cables is important for so many applications and is effected by the topology of the cables, resistivity of conductors, the skin effect...

But are you saying that this has no effect at audio frequencies Stuzzo?

stuzzo: Well for copper at  10kHz signal the skin depth (corresponding to ~37% reduction in current density) is about 0.7 mm which is probably quite a bit more than the average strand size, whereas at 1mhz it's .07mm, 10mhz .02mm (ref:Wikipedia).

stuzzo: I note an Audioholics article calculation on speaker cables where they concluded " Actual measured increase in AC Resistance due to Skin Effect at 20 kHz is less than 3%".