Speaker Wire

What are you hooking up? I've never quite understood it, but there seems to be more voodoo out there around speaker wire than almost anything else. In the end its about using something with a sufficient gauge to not add any more resistance to the output of the amp than you have to. Bigger is better.

Hi John,
for most applications a gauge of 0.75mm^2 (~18 AWG) is totally O.K for short ways. This results e.g. in a loss at 2m length of ~1% on 8Ohm / ~2% on 4Ohm.
Get a thick cheap 2-core with, say 4mm (12AWG or 10AWG), and you get 1% max. loss over a distance of 5 m and an excellent highest end speaker cable. 2.5mm^2 (roughly 14 AWG) would be *totally* ok if you have shorter ways. I don't believe you or me could tell the difference sonically.
Well, we have metric system, but you get the picture, i added AWG type later for your convenience...

Price does not matter. (Oh yes, please forgive me mjb...but this is my truest belief..)
We get fine-stranded thick speaker cable in the hardware stores for a few bucks. Works perfect. And yes, we also had finest high priced cable for hundreds of buck, too (sigh...my brother learns it the hard way...i am the more scientific one) - no difference.

Forget about things like dampening factor (the highest dampening factor in nearly all cases is inside your speaker...), skin effect (measurable only above 1 MEGAhertz...) or inductivity (even at a really high value, let's say 10nH,there would be a corner frequency in UKW range, 90MHz, it really does not matter for audio)....

Advertisers will write the whole day about these things - but they do NOT matter in practice. And magazines don't write the above stuff - because it does not sell the stuff of their advertisers....

Possibly you have the perfect cable already...

One thing i tried and i was unsure if it does better things was cutting the cable in the mid and brought the cores to a distance of roughly an inch with a little help of our beloved gaffa tape, cheap and easy. Should reduce inductive effects between the cores. Well, it costed me nothing but a few minutes of time, and i don't know if i can hear a difference, so what. Some people swear to it.
But we are talking a very high level of audiophilia already with stuff like this...
I never bothered to do the math behind this, so it might be - cough - esoteric!

Best regards,
Martin

Using 12s here, works just fine

The only thing I have to add is that if you use connectors on the ends of your cable, solder them on. It doesn't matter how thick your cable is if you can't transfer the current to the load because your 150 strand 10AWG cable only has 10 strands touching the conductor on the connector, and simply screwing on a connector doesn't lend itself to perfect power transfer..

Indeed! Thats something I often run across that makes me scratch my head. Crimp connectors get you a little bit closer, and might be fine for small signals (thought even then), but when you're actually talking about transferring a sizable current you need as solid a connection as is possible! I like to get a good quality spade connector (assuming the speaker has a binding post that will accept it) crimp it on and then sweat solder down into the crimp. Use a good solder and you're good to go!

Yes, anytime I need a removable connection, this is exactly what I do.  Use the flattest contact connector possible(flatter surfaces touching means more contact and more power transfer) and solder it onto the cable.  If the connections are the screw down post types, I've also been known to make a ring out of the end of the cable and solder it, then file it flat without even using a connector!  I've done this with solid romex (house electrical wiring) too.  

I've used Kimber 8TC for speaker cables since the 1990's. I found nothing close for the price. It's a 16 wire teflon coated pure copper design. Yes, it's a PITA to strip, combine and solder. I use 8 sections twisted around the other 8 and solder them together with 4% silver solder. Those are fitted into gold plated heavy duty banana plugs to fit the Adcom GFA power amp and JBL speakers.

Ray Kimber knows wire and has the Agilent and HP network analyzers to test it with. I know of no other high end cable makers with a lab like his. His pure silver/teflon wire is even more impressive, as is the price. I also use the silver wire in my mics between the capsule and jfet, the fader wiring in my console and a few runs of his 19 AWG pure silver AGSS 3 braid for mic cables and the output of my console to the PCM4222 ADC.

Once heard and used, it's pretty hard to go back to copper.

John, I gotta say, all due respect to smallbutfine, I've found the choice of speaker wire to be important, because I hear differences when comparing different types.

For two years beginning around 1995, I was a beta tester for high end cable manufacturers, so I've heard and listened carefully to almost everything from lamp cord to $2500 cables. I realize that for some reason this is the biggest can of worms to open online, why, who knows? So, I'll say my peace and then bow out of the potential $hitstorm that inevitably follows.

I'm well aware the pitfalls of every testing method, and yes, holes can be punched in all of them. In certain high end stereo systems it can make sense to try some of the expensive brands, but where I settled was for the " better" brands in a basic, better, best, pricing model. "Better", meaning exactly something like jimwilliams mentioned, Kimber Cable. In fact, I use a less expensive brand called Tributaries, which is like a better quality material radio shack cable.

So, my advice, take one step up from the hardware store or Radio Shack, look for some used cable on Craigslist or Audiogon, or just see what Tributaries wire sells for. I vaguely recall spending under $100 for a length that cost around $40 for Radio Shacks brand, so it wasn't a bank breaker, just a little more invested in what after all is the link to all your sound. If anyone thinks cable doesn't color the sound, they haven't tried enough brands. When I switched from Radio Shacks wire to Tributaries wire I listened to a track where I always thought the bass was a synth, and now could clearly tell it was a real bass, it was that different. I also could hear certain words distinctly in a Tom Waits song that I assumed he'd mumbled, because they were unintelligible previously. That's a big difference to me. Not every test reveals differences immediately, sometimes they reveal themselves over time, but from then on, your ear hears it immediately, like a mustard spot on an otherwise clean tie, your eye goes right to it.

The science is beyond me, I just use my ears, but do it carefully, and methodically.

Oh, and yes, termination is very important.

It's these. I used them with my Proacs... had a ton of guys with them tell me these were the best cables they'd found for studio 100's. 

vintageking.com/index.php/catalog/product/view/id/2182/

If the weakest link really determines the quality of the whole chain - well, then it is not the speaker wire. Think about internal amplifier wirings, PCBs etc...none of them is 2.5mm or 4.0mm.
Some standard oxygen free copper cable does the trick as good as any sophisticated cable sensation from the voodoo society. The moment I stopped considering Kimber products was when I read about "break in" times for their cables on their website. I guess you can reduce them by listening to a choir of blond virgins from Iceland. Utter bullshit.

BS? Breaking in cables, yes. Blonde virgins from Iceland, no.