Affordable Speaker cable suggestion

I'm moving to a house that will require me to place one of my speakers about 12' from my system (see signature for details),

Can anyone recommend good speaker cable that won't break the bank? Budget is about $150 per run ($2-300 max total) but would love to stay well under that!

Thank you in advance for any good recommendations

 

Audioquest Type 4, bare ends, 12ft run

The pair would be $140 from Audioadvisor.com

I had a pair of these - a vg value.

 

Recently discovered tnt audio. Briefly i turned to their DIY section. Oh boy! Made some cables . 2 x 14 feet they cost about £40.
The cable was obtained from Maplins. I already had the bananna plugs.it used solid core cat5 wire.3 lengths of it plaited together, this rejects rfi.
Solid core is ideal for speaker cables. Stranded (according to the designer) is poor for loudspeakers.
They are comparable to kimber 4tc.
How do they sound ?
Amazing. A lot of my niggly problems
Have gone bass is clean and firm treble is very refined and soundstaging , spectacular.
The difference is not subtle!
Believe me it has transformed my system and life,as they also show how to make interconnects. There are several cables to choose from. The one i built was the FFRR cable.

 

Blue Jeans Cable

Blue Jeans Cable -- Quality Cables at Reasonable Prices »

 

Do you have pics of these cables? Was checking out the TNT site. Is this the three cable twist? I've noticed you mention your new revelatory speaker cables a few times and I'm intrigued. Peace

 

Or two with bi wire termination. I don't know

 

Blue Jean cables x2.

 

Most speaker wire of sufficient gauge for the application will work perfectly well. Use Belden 5000u, or any equivalent. Don't buy into psychological BS pushed by the so-called high-end speaker wire makers. They all babble about technical matters that have nothing to do with electrical signals operating at audio frequencies in home environments at the voltages, currents and very short distances that exist in home environments.

Avoid extra expense for alleged protection from RFI, because RFI doesn't interfere with audio frequencies transmitted through speaker wires or interconnects. It certainly doesn't interfere with optical signals through TOSlink/optical interconnects either. RFI can interfere with poorly shielded or poorly designed preamps mind you, but there's no speaker or interconnect wire on earth that can alleviate that sort of problem. Just because a piece of speaker cable is long(ish) doesn't make it an antenna.

Make your own speaker cables, make them the same length, use good quality spade or banana connectors that have dual allen screws that you can tighten well and that have screw-on shields/strain relief that you can back off from time to time to tighten the allen screws. Use some heat shrink tubing at the end of the cable split so it doesn't open up any more than you want. That's about it.

The cable insulator should be tough enough to withstand the inevitable accidents, e.g., stomping from a chair leg, chafing from being inadvertently wedged between a stand or cabinet and the baseboards, and so on. The home installation people love cable such as the aforementioned Belden 5000U, Cardas Crosslink, Thundercable Evolution Series, and their competitors. Tough cable, available in 10 gauge or 12 gauge, it's all very easy to work with, electrically excellent (low capacitance, low impedance, low inductance), that will last for years. Buy a small spool of the cable, make what you want, keep the rest of your money in your pocket.

I like the banana connectors made by Oyaide. Very sturdy, very good contact surface, alloy allen screws that can really be tightened. No threaded shields on these ones, so I use red and black heat shrink for strain relief. Avoid poorly made and relatively fragile banana connectors from companies such as Sewell that do a huge business on Amazon. Sewell does make one or two connector models that are good, but the rest are junk that have poor contact surface, weak set screws and only fair strain relief.

If you don't really want to make your own speaker cables - e.g., if you feel that there really is something better about a pair of speaker cables made by a factory that does it all day/every day, check out the Blue Jeans Cable web site for excellent quality speakers cables, interconnects and so on. They really like the Belden cable that I mentioned above, but they offer terminated cables of all kinds using a couple of other makes of wire. My opinion is that if you spend more money than Blue Jeans Cable is charging, you're basically wasting it. Fifty bucks and you're done, and you'll have a pair of speakers wires that will perform in precisely the same manner as a pair of $750 cables from Audioquest, a pair of $5,000 cable from Nordost, or a pair of $15,000 cables from whichever luxury cable maker is touting that sort of nonsense these days to uber-wealthy audiophiles who are floating in cash and have nothing else to do with it.

As John Costanza (owner of My Kind Of Music, in Toronto) said to me a few months ago, "Why would you spend $18,000 on speakers and connect them with $400 cables? Look at these cables here. At $3500 they make much more sense and will show off these speakers beautifully." Problem is, the 8 gauge cabtyre (produced by generic wire factory) is no more or less electrically valid than the Belden 5000U. In a truly blind test, no one on earth can tell the difference. But that $3500 garden hose-size speaker cable sure does look s-e-r-i-o-u-s.

Audiophiles and music lovers can spend money on whatever they want. I certainly do. But if it's the best possible sound you want, go with my suggestions and don't look back. Instead, let fools like me waste money trying every expensive toy and experimenting with every marketing ploy wrapped around speaker cables and interconnects. Be smarter than that.

 

Yawn...in before lock...again.

 

Fan of Signal Cable here. Both IC's and speaker cable. Multiple options under your price range.

 

10 0r 12 Ga cable from Home Depot. You probably won't hear a difference & have >$250 to spend elsewhere in the system or for music which is why we're all in this game.

 

I've been very pleased with the wire below. I run 500 watts to each channel, so I wanted some 'water hose' cable to make sure there was no loss/degradation. He sells some very good connectors as well.

KnuKonceptz Twisted Pair 8 Gauge Speaker Cable Wire OFC »

 

Yes, the 3 wire twist, i plaited instead, may try out twist on my other system.to
This cable is seriously good, and transformed my system, each solid core wire is insulated By polyethylene which
is superior to PVC.
Am working my way through all their designs.
One album in particular" Seventh Sojurn" by the "Moody Blues always had a sort of glare or high frequency distortion. I suspected the Lp as faulty in mastering. Not anymore!

 

Will try and add picture. You can add 13 mm sheath to budget to encase the wire adding to its looks!

 

Morrow.

 

Thanks, you seemed pretty pumped about the new wires, and they don't cost an arm and a leg. Will probably try it. Peace

 

I pretty much hate Blue Jeans cable. Sounds like garbage in any system I use it in....except for that Belden speaker cable. I don't use it in my systems at present but used it in my home theater. It's good enough that I would use it in a pinch in any system in the house.

 

I am sure that you won,t regret it. It appears that manufacturer buy their
Wires from the same suppliers, ,Rspares, maplin, Belden and sleeve them, you can build interconnects using the outer cover of shoe lace!
As you say it costs very little.
I have, in the past used 2.5 twin and earth. Mains csble. Very smooth!

 

If you've ever spent too much money on audiophile speaker cables and believed it sounds better (as I have), pop a driver out of your speaker and take a look inside. Chances are very high that all the internals are wired with garden variety 24 AWG and slip-on on spade connectors.

The only real considerations for speaker cables are that the connections are clean and not oxidised, and that the gauge is appropriate for the length so as to avoid too much capacitance. The rest is spin in my opinion.

 

I cannot agree with that, at all.

 

Well thats what's been inside just about every hifi speaker I've ever opened up!

 

You must have bought some really cheap speakers in the past. FYI, the ones you just bought use 16 gauge chassis wire.

 

Gauge of the conductor doesn't affect capacitance, but resistance -- the thicker wire has lower resistance than the thinner wire, so we use thicker wires with longer runs of speaker cable for lower resistance so it can handle the current without overheating or, particularly with higher output impedance tube amps, have a negative impact on damping factor. Capacitance is going to be related to the dielectric material used and the spacing of the conductors, not conductor gauge, and with speaker cables, unless you're using some kind of odd geometry cable with extremely high capacitance in longish runs and using an amplifier that with oscillate in the face of that much capacitance, you're unlike to have any problem with speaker cable capacitance. But picking conductors of one gauge or another isn't going to tell you anything about the capacitance.

Total loop inductance may be another issue. It could affect upper octave response. Not at all likely to be a problem with very short cable runs , but possibly with runs longer that 10 or 15 feet -- that's why what goes on inside a speaker for a couple of inches in terms of signal wire isn't really relevant to what's best for 12 feet from amp to speaker.

Of course a lot of what we might hear or not relating to speaker cable depends on the amp's and the speakers' impedance curves, so there maybe be some circumstances in which one person hears a difference between two sets of cables and another circumstance in which another person with different amps, speakers and lengths, doesn't.

And there are others who will point to ringing from reflected signal and various solutions they offer to deal with that -- whether its zobel network or other things done at the termination, or George Cardas' argument for "matching the signal propagation velocity of the conductor to that of the dielectric," and other things that may make small, measurable and audible differences.

I think it's probably fair to say that the most important baseline thing for speaker cable is total resistance, and therefore gauge of conductor, and the second most important thing is probably loop inductance and therefore geometry of the cable -- and of course for all connectors and switches, clean contacts always matter. But I think it calling everything but gauge "spin" is inappropriately dismissive of other things that do matter -- basic things like inductance, and less well consider and more difficult to address but not insignificant things like cable resonance in the face of load and source impedance. They may matter less than the other things. Their audible impact may be relatively small. The sonic effects may be dependent on related things like variations in load impedance (as most things in audio are: dependent on application). But they exist, they're not just spin.

 

For simple, relatively inexpensive, convention geometry cables easily ordered online I'd say: 12 AWG good copper parallel or twisted pair is always a solid choice and the Belden 12 AWG cable from Blue Jeans is good -- you could certainly buy the Belden in bulk and roll your own or just cut to length and use bare wire. But Blue Jeans seems to do a good termination job.

For affordable, slightly lower inductance, teflon dielectric, you can use the Cardas 11.5 AWG Litz cable in a twisted pair which KAB sells terminated with Cardas spades or bananas and which Kevin at KAB will make at any length for you. A 12-foot pair would come in at under $200. That's more of a pain to make yourself because the Litz wire requires special effort in stripping. If you have a solder pot you can go for it, if not, just buy it terminated.

 

The best speaker designer I know recommends solid core installation wire. It´s normally very cheap, and of top quality.
I use AWG 14 myself.