What is the best and economical wire for rear surround speakers ?

Question

I am setting up my home theater system. For my surround speakers I need eatch -at least- 50 feet speaker wire. What is the best speaker wire for this set up ? the thinner the better, Is 16 gauge good enough ?

I believe the surround speaker outputs around 25 watts each.

Thanks

Answer 1

First of all, using premium brand wires really gets you no useful results over standard speaker wire.

Have a read of the cited article. The writer talks in detail about these issues, and what lengths of wire are best to use with what thicknesses. No, thicker is better for longer runs of wire.

He suggests that 48 feet is the maximum for 16 gauge wire, so you're close to that at 50 feet. The next step up is 14 gauge.

Answer 2

For an 8 ohm load(speakers) that would need 50 feet of wire, you need to get at least a 16AWG wire. . GO to a Homedepot or Target and buy the thickest wire you can afford. I placed a link here as a guide for wire gages to use. I suggest that you use the same length of wires for each channel.

Answer 3

The standard answer from speaker companies is 16 or 14 gauge for 25-50ft runs.  Greater than 50ft should be 14 or 12 gauge. (see reference from Polk Audio below).  I would recommend 14 gauge in your case.  You should know that the thicker the cable the lower the resistance and less power it takes to push the signal down the wire.  So the thicker the cable the less signal you are losing to resistance.  Also remember that one day you may decide to upgrade your system and want the thicker cables which would not be easy to replace especially if they are going inside the walls.

My personal choice is 12 gauge Belden 5000 series Cable from BlueJeansCable.com.

http://www.bluejeanscable.com/store/spea...

Update: It does not matter at all if the speaker wires are the same length to each channel.  The signal travels down the wires at speeds way faster than what your ears could ever detect (near the speed of light).  It might start mattering if the wires were different by say several thousand feet which obviously is not the case.  Someone might argue that you need to make them the same length to ensure the same resistance which could impact sound level.  This also doesn't matter because individual speaker level is easily adjusted (and needs to calibrated anyway)  in the receiver settings.  So no need to spend extra money on trying to make them all the same.

Hope that helps!

Answer 4

i would first find out the total watts,i use 16 gage for my system on 325 total watts works fine but 18 gage might be the thing to use on yours at only 25 watts per channel.

walmart price 100 foot roll 16 gage 18 dollars.

walmart price 50 roll 18 gage 7 dollars.