How will romex work as in wall speaker wire?

I am going to install wire for my rear surrounds in the wall. I understand that I should get wire rated for in wall use because of fire codes and the way the wire burns (or doesn't) if shorted. I have searched and found in wall rated "speaker wire" to be quite expensive. I am wondering how well 12 gauge romex will work as speaker wire. Any input would be appreciated concerning the romex, or other styles of wire. I know what to do, and want to stay within wiring codes just incase I ever sell this house. Thanks.

 

Donno how this may help, but just about any wire can get hot when shorted, burning away the casing and can (although not known to) set something else on fire. If the insulation and wall board is flame resistant, I can see no reason for worry....

However, this wire is not for AC use. Given the state of intention (audio) I know not how the wire could catch on fire, no matter how loud you play your Kiss CDs.

I don't think wiring in this application could put you into wiring code hell..... Just my opinion though...

 

Welcome to Steve's cleandan!

I believe the law differs everywhere you are but because speaker wire has your amp in front of them a fuse would blow first if there ever was a short in your system.

Don't cheap out though because your whole system is only as good as it's weakest link.

Better recommendations can be made if you wouldn't mind filling out your equipment in your profile.

 

Romex will most likely sound like crap. If that stuff had any potential we would know by now. Some cheapo reviewer would have been raving about it. The voltage is not very high going into a speaker and the wire will not get hot enough to burn. Imagine all of the house fires there would be where people (me included) use zip wire/lamp cord for speaker wire.

 

Isn't the special wire to run in walls for fire prevention called Plenum? I think it has to do with the coating on the outside of the wire being fire retardant. Something is telling me this.. I could be wrong though. If so, just ignore me.

 

Welcome to the forum Dan!

Does anyone have the link to the Jon Risch info. Maybe he has something for this purpose.

 

His site is on Geocities. Jon Risch

Regards,
Geoff

 

Darn me.... I didn't realize Dan was new... Shame on me.

Dan, welcome and pardon my rudeness. Gad you're here!

 

I've used 14 ga romex wire for speakers and couldn't tell a difference in sound. For my speakers now I use 18 ga (solid core) wire (about 10 ft.) and can't hear degradation. I think there seems to be a lot of hype about wire. I build speakers. When I put the crossovers together I see solid core inductors 16 ga. and 20 ga. that have many (hundred +) feet of wiring. The resistors and caps have about a 20 gauge feed in. Then there is the actual speaker coil that is made of hundreds of feet of thin 30 ga. or less wire. Now all that wire in the crossovers and speakers is not some esoteric wire; just plain copper solid core. Now after seeing all that, I find it difficult to understand how that relatively small length of wire from amp to speaker can make a difference; all is required, IMHO, is the adequate gauge for the run.

 

Welcome Dan!


JohnG

 

Hello fellow B.C.er and welcome to Steve's

Well I'm not a techie, but I can tell you for sure there are major differences in both speaker cables and interconnects. Another forum member (Gary) rewired his old Tannoy speakers with Kimber Silverstreak IC wire and it made some huge improvments. Every different set of speaker cable or IC's that I've tried, and there are quite a few, sound different in my system. Some subtle, some dramatic.

Curiously, what's your system? (perhaps you may want to fill out your profile to avoid this question again in the future)

Regards.

 

Reactance

I agree with you if I understand you correctly?

The internal components that are used in amplifiers, receivers, etc. are usually not silver soldered or high purity copper wire or overly heavy gauge wire so why bother at the speaker wire level.

It would beneficial to know what wire the engineer used to design the speaker's sound properties. As with any change of wire length or gauge would change the sound by effect of resistance and or capacitive reactance.

I believe that a heavy gauge wire should be used to carry the signal properly to the speakers; but I can't buy into the pure silver wire theory as you may be able create measurable differences rather than audible differences.

However there is the effect of resistive and capacitive reactance and it would be helpful to see published scientific results of all the effects of wire types when used in an audio environment. Then you may be able to create the effective sound that you desire.

 

Re: Reactance

This may be true of cheaper hifi amplifiers, but when we look at high performance amplifiers, it's a different story.

Take, for example, the JC-1 by Parasound. The circuit design is by John Curl.

Carl Thompson did the board layout, and this went through an number of iterations. One would not think that positioning elements on a circuit board would make much difference, but in fact the final layout was SIGNIFICANTLY quieter (i.e. measured signal to noise ratio) than the early versions.

Bob Crump then spent a long time "voicing" this amp; trying different passive components of the same value to improve the sound. This includes careful selection of output terminals (Parasound could not understand why he wanted the particular speaker posts he chose - they were 10 times the cost of similar looking ones; Bob had his way).

Once the CTC team (Curl-Thompson-Crump) had finished their work, Parasound engaged the engineering capacity of their offshore factories (Taiwan) to produce the amplifiers. The release date was delayed by more than a year because small manufacturing variations from the original prototype had such a profound effect on the sound (so I have read). Eventually, the Taiwanese factory came around and the amp was released; and the CTC team were happy.

My argument is that a good system can be made into a truly great system by attention to detail - all aspects must be put under the microscope. I'm referring to interconnects, speaker cables, power cables, outlets, resonance control, room treatment etc. Never assume that something will not have an effect - you may be surprised what small differences the ear can detect.

Regards,
Geoff

 

Re: Re: Reactance

Interconnects, shielding is important. Room treatments are very important.
Quality of the speaker cabinets important for unwanted resonancy. But for speaker cable the function is take carry a electric signal to the speaker crossovers. I think that when one listens very hard to discern differences, they actually begin to notice the sound more critically. What advantage they hear is not necessarily technical but rather audio-psycho.
But this can be argued till the cows come home. What really is important, is that your system sounds pleasing to your ears.
Fortunately for me, my ears are relatively inexpensive to please. It's the music that counts.