Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Should speaker cable length be equal?

Since the original poster told us his cable was 12ga, there was never an argument about longer distances and lesser gauges.
However, with the distances he had specified, he would not get any signal loss even while using 16ga cable which was my point.
Obviously 22ga at 40 feet is a bit silly but so is using 10 or 8ga wire.

JohnK had posted on this not long ago. He linked to a webpage with the table of recommendations (based on science) enclosed. It is very useful for obtaining a general idea of max lengths per gauge and he does discuss lengths beyond 50 feet.

"Obviously 22ga at 40 feet is a bit silly but so is using 10 or 8ga wire."

If I could find some good, reasonably priced in-wall 8ga wire I would most definitely install it. Who knows what future upgrades may be, and who knows what the impedences of those speakers may be. Just looking at the length of run and the wire size works in most cases, but a speaker that is rated as 4 ohms may actually dip into the 2 ohm range at certain bass frequencies, and such a speaker connected to an amp by a 40' cable would definitely perform better with 10ga wire than 12ga wire.

I've got some 8 ga in my car that was relatively inexpensive (something like $30 for 8 feet or so).

Of course, it's my jumper cables...

Sean, I'm aware of two claimed disadvantages of unequal length speaker wires. The first, more commonly raised, that there will arise a "timing" difference between the speakers, is total nonsense. Speaker wires carry the signal at speeds approaching that of light(close to 186,000 miles per second). The differences in length that could possibly exist in the home result in far less than a millionth of a second delay and are meaningless.

The second complaint is that the greater loss due to more resistance in the longer wire will "unbalance" the sound. This would be theoretically possible, but doesn't happen with the gauges and lengths of run used in the home. As the handy table at the end of this article shows, even the difference in loss on your 10foot/40foot combination would only be about 0.1 dB(out of maybe a 70-80dB average sound level). Moving your head a couple inches or putting a pillow on one side could have more effect.

Of course, as Bill and others have mentioned, for a totally different reason very thin wire shouldn't be used on long runs(e.g. 24ga on your 40 foot run).The table here shows recommended usages to avoid having a too-high resistance interract with the swings in speaker impedance and cause fluctuations in frequency response.

So, the differences in length which you propose would cause no problem, and in addition the 12ga wire would be more than enough for even your 40 foot run.

Thank you everyone for your responses. You confirmed what I had thought, but I justed wanted to make sure there weren't issues I wasn't aware of.

-Sean

Long time skulker, first time poster...

At the distances for cable ga. you describe, it's really academic matching lengths, I'd save the few dollars and make them as short as reasonable for your setup.

Bren R.

Welcome! and skulk no more. Join the fray.

Thanks for the welcome - figured I'd finally sign up for a username and post.

Bren R.

I agree with everything JohnK has said in his previous post. However, I would like to add what I was told about speaker cable lengths when I first got into hifi quite some years ago.

In regards to a two-channel setup, I was told that it is very good practice to make sure that your speaker cables are of equal lengths and to keep them as short as needed for your space. This is because of the resistance and strain placed on your amp to carry the current to the speakers. Your amp is forced to work overtime on one channel if that specific cable is significantly longer than the other one. After a while, it could be the cause of failure on the amp. Please noticed that I said "significiantly longer." I'm sure that a relatively slight difference in variation is fine, and that the cables don't need to match down to the exact centimeter.

With that in mind, for my five-channel setup, I've got the front l/r speaker cables the same length (about 6' each), the l/r rears the same length as each other (about 15' each) and then a short run of 4' to the center channel.

Hope this helps.
Kevin

In reply to:

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In regards to a two-channel setup, I was told that it is very good practice to make sure that your speaker cables are of equal lengths and to keep them as short as needed for your space. This is because of the resistance and strain placed on your amp to carry the current to the speakers. Your amp is forced to work overtime on one channel if that specific cable is significantly longer than the other one.

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Again, I'd say it's mainly academic at that point, the extra strain on the amp from 10 feet more 12ga. wire is negligible. What would be worse would be the inductive coil created by having extra wire hanging around, which would somehow find its way into a looped pile, most probably through a well meaning significant other.

Bren R.