Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Wire wire wire! AHHHHH!!!! Help!!!

OK, I have all my equipment picked out and bought! Now its time to hook it all up! LOL! I would like to have decent wire for my hookup, and most of all to my Subwoofer as I want to keep my bass tight and sounding like it should. Now there are so many out there to choose from, and all the specs I see, might as well be written in Alien!! LOL!
Could someone please give me some help? Here is what I have considered:
Tara Labs 2200s 4m for $56.00
IXOS 1000 Gold Gamma Studio 5m $69.99
Can anyone tell me which of these, or maybe one they would recomend in this price range? I have already been told to stay away from Monstercable and really I do not mind spending $60-$100 for 5 meters for the Sub wire. Thanks!

Oak, the wire you use to connect your receiver to your sub has nothing whatever to do with how "tight" the bass is. You've apparently been reading or hearing some more audio nonsense. Any coaxial cable with an RCA plug on each end does fine. You can get one for about $5 at RadioShack. If you want to splurge on a pretty-colored cable with gold connectors you might have to go about $20. Don't waste your money.

If that is so, then why in speaker wire reviews, people claim they can hear a difference between wires? You will hear things like Bass is Clearer, or this wire gave more life to the mids or highs, then another particular wire? There has to be some difference or there would not be a $2,500 + wire out there! LOL!

Two thoughts come to mind, one involves a P.T. Barnum quote . The other is this:

If someone spends many thousands for a home theatre setup it is only natural that they may feel that the connections should also be high end. Having said that I think there are much better ways to spend your money as far as your ears are concerned.

My idea of highend is AR (cheap and onsale) for connections and the appropriate gauge wire for your speakers, bought at a big box hardware store. If in doubt go with 12 although that is probably overkill for short runs.

I think my one hangup is that all connections be by one manufacturer if possible, no reason other than it looks nice and this gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Now to get really scientific; if b-amping does one use two different wires or is one "bright" and the other "warm"? Do you wrap them around each other, or parallel to each other, or in fact is one straight with the other one wrapped around it. In the latter case how would one adjust for the differing lengths in the wires? Or would the longer wire simply go to the smaller speaker letting the bulk of the larger speaker make up the difference.

I'm sure yours is a sincere question, just do a search in this forum and you will find a lot of sensible information.

gotta go; my work is done.

cheers

Oh boy

Oak,

Will Nike shoes make you run faster than Adidas?

Copper is copper. Go with some very low cost cables, like AR or Phoenix Gold or AMX. Even Radio Shack. Yes, there is a difference between 2$ cables and 30$ cables, I've noticed it for my component connection to my TV. Otherwise, I can't say I've ever heard a difference.

Oak, the general advice people have given here is on the money.
Any cable will do although the best conductive metals are often preferred so there is as little signal degradation as possible from source to speaker.
That means copper (or silver if you really want to buy expensive crap but that would be ridiculous).
Beyond that the only criteria for you buying cables should be price.
Reviews of cables are almost never done using a blind tested method, hence any perceived sound changes are due to the reviewers own brain expecting change.

There is plenty of info throughout these forums on both speaker cable and interconnects. The search button is a useful tool.

Those damned wire reviews drive me NUCKING FUTS! I want to scream and laugh at the same time. The truth is that most wire companies like to buy Belden cable for less than a buck a foot, make it look pretty, then sell it to suckers out there for a hundred times as much. If a cable has a god shield to protect from interference and half decent connectors there's no way in hell there is any AUDIBLE difference. I bought a Monster sub cable to upgrade from the tny pice of junk my old sub came with and I didn't notice any quanitifiable different other than there was less buzzing in the background, and even that was minor. Save the esoteric products for the esoteric people.

If you think you will hear a difference you probably will.
If you think you won't here a difference you probably won't
Daniel

In reply to:

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If that is so, then why in speaker wire reviews, people claim they can hear a difference between wires?

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Psychology. People expect $2000/m cables to sound better than $.47/m cables. However, every single double blind test I've ever seen demonstrated the total inability of even the experts to determine if any of the cables sounded better than one another. Some of the more anal claimed they could hear differences, but none ever consistently picked the expensive cables as better sounding.

The result: there may be a tiny difference in the resulting signal, but it's so microscopic and it doesn't produce a discernably BETTER signal, ever.

In reply to:

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There has to be some difference or there would not be a $2,500 + wire out there!

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If there's an idiot willing to pay $2,500 for cables, I'd happily wrap some Belden in a carbon fiber sheath to look pretty and sell them the cables. I have no problem taking money from stupid people. That doesn't mean the result is any better. People spend ridiculous amounts of money for zero return all the time.

Semi, count me in on that.

Read this excerpt from Absolute Sound on a review of some Kimber interconnects:

"With and accurate tonal balance, great transparency, and wonderful bass definition..."

What garbage! I'd be glad to put my $4.50 homemade cables against anything out there. I also wouldn't mind selling them for what the Kimbers sell for.

Daniel

I've been waiting for the right time to post this.

"...As with the amplifiers, there was a notable reduction in the already low amounts of smear and blur. A fine curtain of mist was lifted from in front of the soundstage of my digital sources, allowing music to emerge with a greater sense of clarity. Again, the sound of the components didn't change their sonic stripes, but there was an increased sense of ease and centeredness that was clearly audible.
... Backgrounds became quieter, low-level detail retrieval improved markedly, and dynamic contrasts took on greater subtlety and sharper contrasts.
... The Monacos are expensive, but their splendid appearance and their across-the-board improvements in resolution, imaging, and dynamics make them a "must audition" for anyone looking to maximize the performance of a high-performance system."

Follow the link to find out what this guy is writing about. You won't believe it.

http://www.stereophile.com/fullarchives.cgi?745

Very impressive, and I'm terribly tempted to go with one of the 4 shelf systems, but I want to know first what effect it has on rhythm and pace. Also I wonder if the reviewer's selection of cables was wide enough to reveal all the benefits.

Shouldnt the sub wire be shielded?

Yes, Adam, the sub connector should be shielded; that's why coaxial cable, which is shielded, is used.

LOL......those stereophile guys are so full of themselves.

Well, with due fear of overdoing it, I could not resist citing another example here. I hope Axiom won't get sued... LOL

The wire in every [Acoustic Zen] cable is made with the Ohno Continuous Cast (OCC) process, which drastically reduces the number of crystal boundaries in a given length of wire. According to Lee, the thousands of boundaries between the metal crystals in a typical cable result in a lengthy break-in period—the signal must burn in the path of least resistance through the cable. (Lee seems to be correct about this. I have had lengthy, tedious experience with high-performance cables that have taken up to 500 hours to finish breaking in; listening through all those hours is not an enjoyable process. The AZ cables gave about 90% of their ultimate performance fresh out of the box, and stabilized completely within 40 hours. That alone makes them something of a marvel.) ...

As a scientist, I have to say that this type of rhetorical style irritates me the most. Certain terms and styles often found in the scientific literature are used in these descriptions within an utterly unscientific context.

This same kind of rhetoric is ubiquitous in, for example, the marketing literature of the nutritional supplement / herbal medicine industry. I am afraid that less-informed people may be readily swayed by the pseudoscientific dress of these marketing lingoes. These are, in every way, as malicious as those nice "poetic" description of sound quality differences that do not exist.

Cheers!

Holy cow! Now that is a bunch of garbage. If my understanding is correct, electrons barely even move much when in an AC signal so this might not have any real relevance to what happens. Plus I don't think there is enough current to really burn anything in at all. Last time I had my sytem cranks my cables were cool to the touch.

The one I really enjoy hearing is the directionality of cables carrying AC signals, HA!

Newcomers to this hobby must be careful where they step as to avoid the BS.

I found that the MonsterBass300 Subwoofer Cable, which is shielded, is about right for my system. I bought mine from http://store.yahoo.com/cell-tronics/monsteraudio.html and paid $29.00 for 4 a meter cable.

So its off to Home Depot for 12gauge wire.

druiem,

Perhaps it is just my local Home Depot store, but be aware that they might carry only up to 14awg. Speaker or lamp wires 12awg or greater are not that common. If you do not want an unexpected wait (I know you are excited), you may want to go ahead and order the wires at places like partsexpress.com, who in fact carries "branded" bulk wires at better prices than Home Depot.

Cheers!

Are you sure you looked in the right place, sushi? It's usually with the large spools they cut to order by the foot. I've never seen a Home Depot that didn't have it, though my sampling space is admittedly only a few stores. That said, given the number of people that recommend it, I'm surprised you had trouble finding some.

Yes, I did, Semi. The racks of huge spools containing up to something like 1/4" diameter solid cupper wire! But I checked only one store closest to my home.

Cheers!

Our Home Depot had speaker wire of that gauge for nearly a buck a foot.
However the material used for the jacket was very stiff.
I ended up getting a deal through a friend for 50 cents a foot for 12awg and the wire was made for flexibility.
Sometimes going with a different brand will get you a 'better quality' wire in a different way.

Accessories4less has Acoustic Research 12-gauge for well under $1/foot.

http://accessories4less.com/aless4/Corporate/itemdesc.asp?CartId=14362344GV-ACCWARE-YZA17&ic=HT%2D222&cc=&tpc=

Forgive me, im a dumbass.

Good artical about wire.
http://home.earthlink.net/~rogerr7/wire.htm

Just ordered a 50 foot spool of 12 gauge from Parts Express for $22.95

Frank