Does quality matter with speaker wire?

Question

Does the thickness or gauge of the wire matter with home theater set-ups? Should all of the wire be the same? Can anyone recommend good quality wire at a reasonable price? I need about 100 feet, and I am not spending $100 for Monster Cable.

Also, I have those metal prongs (don't know what they're called) that connect to the speaker wire to make it easier to feed the wire into the receiver. Are these good? Does the quality matter with them?

Answer 1

YES! THE THICKNESS MATTERS! typically i use 18 gauge, but occasionally, depending on the size of the wire, you'lll need to match it closely. Make the least amount of extra connections as possible. The thicker the wire, the more sound it can carry.

Answer 2

Here is a good place to start.  Crutchfield is pretty hip about this stuff.

http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/S-BNyQ...

Answer 3

Buy good quality 16 or 14 gauge copper speaker wire and you'll be fine. You do want polarized wire which simply means that one side will have a designation (like a white stripe) to hook up the positive and negative correctly. It is important to get the polarity right. Home Depot sells both 14 and 16 guage. The 16 is fine for runs up to 50'. If your runs are longer, go with the 14 guage. The metal prongs are fine if you connect them properly and securely to the wire but I'd skip them. It's easy enough to hook up the wire without them and it elliminates a potential loose connection at that point.

Answer 4

For higher-end (really sensitive) music systems, the speaker wires do have a small, small influence.

But a home-theater system is very different. The best advice is that you buy a spool of oxygen-free 12 ga and use it everywhere.  Spools can be bought from www.partsexpress.com for a decent price.

"Metal Prongs" - Do you mean Banana Plugs?

I am a big fan of banana plugs. You MUST do a neat wire job with speaker wires as a single strand of copper sticking out could cause a short months down the road. Banana plugs make it easy to create a safe connection.

The Radio Shack 278-310 single bananas are neat and simple to use (PartsExpress carries similar for a buck or two less). You just strip 1/8 - 1/4 inch of insulation, thread the wire up the inside and fold the copper strands back over the edge. s***w down the banana part and you have a neat, safe plug.

They also have dual-bananas (278-308) which take the wires in the side holes, but I use these behind the speakers because they stick out pretty far for behind the receiver.

Answer 5

I’m not so much of a stereo guru, but I’m an electrical engineer.  So here is what I know:

A wire that is too thin will attenuate the signal, and wires that are made of different materials will have different levels of attenuation.  The longer the wire, the more difference it makes.  If you have an ohmmeter, touch the leads together, and it should show a resistance of .01 ohms, or something really small like that.  If you can touch the leads to each side of the speaker wire, and you still get a reading of .01 ohms, the wire isn’t attenuating enough to make an audible difference in the sound.  

Over a 2-foot chunk of wire, even the cheapest, wire won’t show any difference, but if you will use longer wires for speakers on the other side of the room, or other side of the house, this is when you will notice if your speaker wire isn’t up to par.  If, for instance, you’re wiring the front and center speakers of a home entertainment center, the wires won’t be so long, so use the cheaper wire, but cut the wire so that it isn’t any longer than you need it to be.  Save the higher quality wires for the rear speakers that you will be running through the walls to the other side of the room.

I’m not sure how much easier the prongs on the wire make it to insert in the hole.  I doubt they do much for sound quality.  If you have a soldering iron, just tin the end of the wire.