Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Speaker cable from BlueJeansCable

I used to always use 12 guage until I read this article 5 years ago and built my own cables for about $50. So now I use these easy to make twisted pairs. Next to resistance and shielding low inductance is important for connecting long runs of speakers. These common shielded 14/4 cables come in twisted pairs...perfect for reducing inductance...and almost as inexpensive as ordinary 12 guage.


http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_10_2/ultralink-CL414-cable-5-2003.html

I have bought speaker cable both from monoprice and bluejeans cable.

I really like the subwoofer cable I bought from BJC... it is very flexible.

Chris, note that the resistance of the speaker wire in series with the resistance of the speaker voice coil constitutes a voltage divider. So, excessive resistance(relative to speaker impedance)in the speaker wire when feeding a speaker having varying impedances across the frequency spectrum would result in the speaker response tending to follow the impedance high and low points. This is the basis for the wire gauge suggestions made in Mr. Russell's frequently cited article , although he doesn't bother to explain the voltage dividing basis for the frequency deviations.

Oh yeah, didn't think of it that way. I'll give you this one.

Although you'd have to be running pretty fine (or a very long run) wire to get the resistance up to the point where it'd have an audible effect on even a 4 Ohm frequency range.

Still to everyone else playing along, any wire of 12 or 14 AWG for room-sized runs will sound the same.

That does point to how some #33 stock would act to change the tone of a speaker.

Sure, Chris; in the Russell article under "Misleading Wire Demonstration", the Monster scam with their apparently 16ga standard wire compared to 50 feet of 24ga or smaller("Hear the Difference!")is discussed. Significant differences in both level and frequency response, of course.

my longest run will be approx 22 ft long for the surrounds

+1 for BJC and Monoprice.

BJC is a great company. Yes, their prices are a little more expensive than what you'll pay at Home Depot or Radio Shack. But whether or not you believe it makes any sonic difference, their cables & connectors are of extremely high quality.

Everyone has a different opinion on the value of interconnects. My opinion is that since I've spent $X-thousand bucks on my home theater system, I might as well spend a little extra to make sure my interconnects are fully up to the task of pushing the electrons around. So no, I don't believe in spending $1,500 for a speaker cable, but I do believe in spending a bit more than the "bare minimum" to make it work. Even if it's solely for cosmetic reasons. I like BJC because they're a small, "mom & pop" operation with great customer service and excellent, no B/S products.

I use BJC cables for my "output" connections. My M80's are bi-amped with their Canare 4S11 (15' each). My center (6') & surrounds (40' each) are run with their Belden 5000UE (12ga). I bought some nice-looking terminators from Monoprice for all of the connections, and mesh tech wrap and shrink tubing from somewhere else for the Canare. Put 'em together myself. With the semi-nicely shrink-wrapped connectors and the flex wrap, they look like $1,000+ boutique cables, for 10% the price. IMHO, anyway.

I have one of their LC-1 7.1 multi-channel cable bundles running from my AVR to my amp. And I use a single LC-1 for my sub-out too. No regrets about any of them. They're just really nicely made and definitely have a quality feel to them. Very easy to work with. I won't argue (here) that they make any sonic difference, but they are cosmetically pleasing and worth the cost to me.

For all the other connections in my system, I use Monoprice cables. I bought about a half-dozen "premium" HDMI cables from Monoprice for the price of ONE Monster HDMI. They all work as perfectly as one would expect. No signal or handshake problems. They just work. My only complaint is that they are very stiff cables. They're a bit tricky to run neatly, and they're stiff & heavy enough that they could put a bit of stress on the component's HDMI jack if they were carelessly connected.

And for the few remaining analog RCA connections in my system, I have a handful of the "premium" Monoprice RCA's. I think I've probably got a half-dozen pairs sitting in my closet, just as extras or for connections replaced with HDMI. They're absurdly cheap, and certainly are a bit nicer than the usual "throw-away" RCA connectors that manufacturers throw in the box with a component.

It was very easy to see, with the chroma burst test patters, that the Blue Jeans offered Belden 1694A component video cables, that they were a marked improvement over the Radio Shack cables I was using before.

But in the audio realm, dealing with in the kHz range instead of MHz, interconnects have quite a bit less demand placed upon them. Still I used BJC's cables there too.

As for flexible HDMI cables, check out Blue Jean's Belden Series-F2. It's what I'm using now, after their old, stiff Series 2 it's like butter.

Hey Peter, how did you end up doing the shrink tubing? I think I tried to make mine too complicated and it ended up looking terrible. I just took most of it off. Do you have any pics?

I support BJC because of this
http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/blue-jeans-strikes-back
Sorry about the "old news" but I love this response
Mel