Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo speaker cable makes a difference!

actually you guys need to go back to physics a firehose would be better then a garden hose if your goal is to have as much water come out in the shortest amount of time. small hose = large resistence. large hose = low resistence, in terms of wires, large wire = less resistence = less energy converted to heat = stronger signal. i have a test for the people who claim that cables don't work well. take some speaker wire, extract just one copper wire from that speaker cable. hook that up to your speakers, compare to the speaker cable as whole. us science majors think extremes you should too

I see a post from JohnK coming in the near future.

Wid, your wish is my command. I didn't think that this thread was going to need much more in the way of replies, since Curtis made a reasonable suggestion to explain why there might have been an audible difference when the wires were changed. There's no way that 16ga and 12ga wires, each in good condition, would audibly change the sound if these were typical length runs of 10' or so to main speakers. Irrelevant analogies to water hoses aren't helpful and neither is the suggestion to take one strand of wire(typically of 36ga or so)and see if it makes a difference. This area holds no technological mysteries and it's apparently time to again cite the the explanation here of a well-respected veteran audio professional.

Oh. isn't it fun to start an age old and many times rehashed argument like new again. It's much more fun than discussing our views on MIchael Moore - and more on point.

Keep 'em coming. I think that this is one of the more fascinating topics on the boards - In fact - not believing that bigger speaker wire will actually help my sound, I nonetheless bought 12 guage wire to hook up my system.

Loose,

I was an astrophysics major at one point -- though I didn't graduate with a degree in it -- so being a scientist gets you no points here. A firehose will get you no more flow than a garden hose. Want to know why? Because a garden hose is more or less the same diameter as the pipe leading to the spigot. With a fire hose attached, the water won't suddenly speed up.

So can we drop the water analogy now? They really have nothing to do with one another.

And as a science major, you should be at least loosely familiar with some engineering methodology. Calculate the necessary materials to get the job done, and then use something slightly better.

Let me throw a curve into this. I take a decent 12g or 14g wire and replace it with the newest audio craze, Silver. Will there be a change? All I hear about now is Silver this and Silver that and freezing cables. I have no clue here but Silver is a great conductor and thus there must be something to it.....or is there?

Copper's a great conductor, too! Frankly, the resistance is so small in any given cable of, say (arbitrarily) 16 ga or less, for distances normally used in home theatre, it really doesn't make a difference.

John, it's true that silver has the best electrical conductivity of the metals, but copper is second and as the table here shows, the difference is negligible in comparison to other metals. A 25 foot copper wire would have the same resistance as about a 27 foot silver wire. Copper is a nearly ideal relatively low cost electrical conductor, so silver wire makes no sense for home audio. Cryogenic treatment is pure hogwash. Incidentally, since the topic has come up, my undergraduate degree is a B.S. in Chemistry, although these days anything much more complicated than H3 O(or whatever they call that stuff)is beyond me. Still, I had enough of the scientific method pounded into me to be able to recognize and not be able to tolerate the charlatans in audio who prey on the gullible.

Yeah I thought so. Dam these Marketing guys!

Well, on a flyer, I hooked the speakers up with fire hose. Didin't seem to improve the sound at all. I think it may improve (wait for it) once the fire hose breaks in. I will say it is damn convenient putting out the fire in the fireplace with my M60.