Nowadays we have all sorts of high-tech AV gear and high-tech AV cables. HDMI, DisplayPort, optical, USB, Dolby, DVD, BluRay, etcetera. So how come when it comes to hooking up the speakers, it’s still done via the equivalent of alligator clips and exposed leads?
It’s not.
You have to use the purest gold, cut with diamonds and bathed in virgins blood. I can hook you up for only $9.000 per foot.
Ah ha, I always knew there was a nefarious hidden agenda behind QT3 and now I know.
Everything you need to know about speaker wire
In short: Lamp cord works great. So will almost any cheap copper wire 18 to 22 gauge.
The short answer is because speaker technology hasn’t changed in a couple hundred years.
I had heard Monster had a new line out.
Thicker is better because loudspeakers might draw a lot of power, screws on blank wire is good enough (and really better than more complicated connections).
If you’re talking about the connectors, it’s because speaker wire doesn’t usually come in fixed lengths for obvious reasons, so pre-terminating it in the factory isn’t really feasible.
I always put banana plugs on the end, though. It’s a net loss of time when you hook them up once, but if you ever need to move anything ever, you will thank yourself.
True this.
Well, say one hundred years. And plasmatronic speakers are rather unlike most other types, though admittedly no longer actually made. Of course they used the same old copper wire…
Well, yeah, that’s pretty much the point. :) The drivers have changed and better manufacturing processes allow for better cabinets, but yeah. Copper wires.
Hah, I brought some 2/0 from work and hooked it up to my buddy’s sound system. He swears his tweeters sound better than they did with this $20/foot RipOffOMatic or whatever wire.
Yeah, I went to my local electronics mom and pop shop and bought speaker cables at like a buck a foot. (these were nice thick cables)
Depending on your equipment, better speaker wire can make an audible difference. Most people probably would never be able to tell and/or give a shit, but it is there.
There is no evidence for that assertion, and many many reasons to believe it false.
Isn’t it speaker experts who refuse to do double-blind tests because being under pressure throws off their super hearing or some such shit?
There certainly is evidence that better speaker wire has better performance. Notice I didn’t say Monster Cable, nor did I say “expensive” wire. Even though Monster does make good cabling, it’s far too expensive and most of the bullet points on the packaging are marketing garbage. Those points are technically all true, but don’t really affect anything in any meaningful way. But connecting high-end gear with lamp cord most definitely will make a difference whether you believe it or not.
Define better in the context of speaker wire, IOW, what attribute(s) of a given type of wire will make it perform better (or worse) as cabling for speakers.
So those of you who claim there can be no difference between different speaker wires would just use, say, a single 0.5 mm copper wire to drive your speakers, yes? It’s cheaper and simpler than thicker wire, after all…
No one’s arguing that there isn’t an important metric for speaker wires; wire gauge is critical. However, proper-gauged wire doesn’t necessitate it costing a fortune, in fact something like lamp cord has all the gauge you need for a 50 foot run pushing 100 watts.
I don’t think anybody said a 28-gauge wire would be fine to drive any set of speakers on the planet. I’m not sure how you got to that conclusion.