Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions What size speaker cable to run?

So we decided to do a test here in our house.

We had an old HTIB with 20WPC for center and surrounds, running thru 24G wire.

One rear channel needed about 36ft of the 24G and the other side about 42, so we ran the 24G center wire on the end of one of the wires to produce the required 42ft.

After connecting one M3 to one end and the receiver to the other end of each 24G wire, we began the test.

.....about a year ago.





....I know, but it's such a hassle to climb up there and string new wire

...besides, hey, it sounds just fine!!

< gratuitous jab >
I demand a re-test! Only this time, put that leviton stuff up against the curiously thin Mapleshade Clearview Golden Helix wire.


< /gratuitous jab >

I have a question: Were the speaker cables touching the floor or did you put them on those little tripods?

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or did you put them on those little tripods?

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They were on my personal tripod... so as not to change my body position relative to the speaker (and possibly reinforce the bass or colour the sound in any way, I squatted and remained in the same position throughout the testing with the cords across my lap.

I have not measured the dielectric properties of my wedding tackle, but I believe them to be pretty inert.

Bren R.

Interelectrode capacatance of wedding tackle consistencly varies proportionally with the level of excitation of the overall system.

Hey JohnK,
Who ever said anything about using a $500 set of speaker cables? Actually, I would expect the Axiom speaker cable to sound very similar to the extension cord because of their similar construction. Magnet wire would be less expensive than the Axiom speaker cable, but I would think that would sound different. I would guess better, but at that point it's subjective.

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Magnet wire would be less expensive than the Axiom speaker cable, but I would think that would sound different. I would guess better, but at that point it's subjective.

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Magnet wire? Like the 32ga. enameled stuff? Yes, it would sound different. It would sound like light zip wire, only worse - I think most of us here agree that ~18ga is a minimum for even short speaker runs. Unless you mean some Litz-braided configuration... in which case, here we go again on the whole "if it's good enough for CAT5, it's good enough for me"... if you want to braid together 64 conductors of that to end up with the equivalent of 14ga. stranded or solid, be my guest... this might make it less tedious.

Bren R.

Magnet wire comes in a huge variety of gauges. I'm talking about running say 6 runs of 23 gauge to each speaker. That gives you 15 gauge at each pole. You don't have to litz braid them if you don't want, simply twist them up.

And the benefit of that over speaker cable would be?

Unfortunately, I don't have magnet wire around anymore... I gave up "rolling my own" passive crossovers 13-14 years ago and haven't started rolling my own toroidal transformers yet.

If you want to make a set and send 'em out, PM me and I'll give you my address... but then again, you'd always have a back door that I didn't use the right amp/speaker/set of ears/amount of Caig spray... so the results would be meaningful to me, but not you.

Bren R.

Your link had me rolling, I always thought that hair thingy looked like an accident waiting to happen.

Please don't get me wrong. I believe all cables sound very similar, but there are slight differences. Granted they may be distorting or causing some sort of frequency roll off, but that is acceptable to me if in the end it sounds more like music. Who knows, I could be fooling myself, but then again so could you.