Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Acoustic Research 16gauge Wire

Hello, I went to BJ warehouse store yesterday and found an AR concert series 16Gauge wire costing $13.99 for 100ft. The price seems to be good, but since the recommended wire gauge is 12 gauge, just want to know what losses will be having if i use 16 gauge wire....thanks....

To quote the infamous Alan Lofft:
"Use 12 or 14-gauge copper wire--good, generic cable (Radio Shack is fine) or the bulk cable from Monster if you want. Nor do the cables to different channels have to be of equal length. Use only as much cable as you require (unless you're anticipating moving the speaker further away). If the cable run is only a few feet or a metre, you can use thinner cable, 16 gauge for example."

From one of my old posts:
"...speaker impedance to gauge may have been an issue in producing a strong enough signal. Mind you 10ft is still not a long run but i was advised that for runs of 10ft or less with 8ohm speakers to use 14ga or less. Longer than 10ft to about 40ft, 12ga and beyond 40 use 10ga. These distances decrease some what for 4ohm speakers"

The price for the speaker wire you found is pretty good but if you have any runs longer than several feet you should really keep with a 14ga or 12ga wire. I actually got a good deal on 10awg Ultralink (about 50 cents Cdn a foot) which is nice and flexible (but also overkill) so you might want to look around.

Sean, a recommendation to use 12 ga is actually a bit conservative for the lengths usually used in home setups. The basic principle involved is that the resistance of the speaker wire shouldn't be too great compared to the impedance of the speakers. Resistance not over 5% of the speaker impedance is a rule often used. 16 ga has a resistance of about .008 ohm per foot and 12 ga about .003. As you can see, 20 feet of 16 ga(which I use) would have a resistance of only about .16 ohm and this gauge should be quite adequate in your size room for your M50s and QS4s. There's nothing wrong with going with a thicker gauge, of course, except that it's a bit more expensive and harder to handle.

JohnK no offense but keeping conservative and thinking forward is far more the better option than coming close to a limit.
Given the information you provided, you would also be recommending 16ga wire for a max. run of 50 feet with an 8ohm speaker. Personally i don't know anyone who would want to do (or has) such a thing. Keeping resistance as low as possible is still the goal and i believe that is why most recommendations come to 14ga or potentially 12, again dependant on speaker impedance and run length.
I would not want to underestimate what home users may come across in having to change their speaker arrangements. From seanandredj's previous posts, there is the use of QS4 surrounds. What lengths of cable they will require is unknown to us. Presently i need to use 40 feet of cable for my QS8 surrounds and i don't have a very large basement room. It just has alot of corners and turns. If those QS8s were Monitor Audio speaker surrounds instead at 6ohm, or i change listening rooms and need 60 foot runs, then the 16awg cable i might have bought last month would not be of much help anymore.
Look to the future a bit when buying bulk speaker cable.

What is it you use for your home setup? Different gauges at all for fronts? rears?

sean

what you can do is double the runs, if you want. so you have 16 ga for positive, 16 ga for negative.

i would much prefer 12 ga though, or 14.

Yes chesseroo, I use only standard 16 ga lamp cord, but I agree that if present or probable future uses would indicate a heavier gauge that it would be wise to use that now. On the possible 50 foot run point( I have nothing nearly that long)the loss for that length of 16ga using 8 ohm speakers is about 0.4 db for the entire 100 foot round trip(the loss for 12ga would of course be proportionally less at about 0.2 db). Losses of these magnitudes wouldn't be perceived as actual volume differences, but could possibly be perceived as a slight quality difference in favor of the higher level( this could be "corrected" by a miniscule increase of the volume control).

In addition to a simple loss of volume, excessive speaker wire resistance could possibly interact with the output impedance of the amplifier to cause variations in frequency response as impedance of the speakers varied up and down. Alan pointed this out in his 8/13 reply on Technical Questions to the question about unequal cable lengths. This is more of a problem with tube amplifiers, which have a much higher output impedance.

While searching for a 12ga wire, i found this article about speaker wire...i'd like to share it with you....

http://www.sundial.net/~rogerr/wire.htm#gordongow

In originally planning my own cable runs, i was informed by a friend of a friend who is a truly crazy electronics repair guy (one of those people who repairs/installs those $50,000 stereo setups for a living) . He was the one who quoted me some approximate cable gauges and lengths and i take his advice quite highly. I was also going to pick up some 14 or 16ga wire when i first bought my Onkyo receiver and i had mentioned to him my speaker choices.
For my mains, the higher gauges would be ok with the short distance but i had known that i would be getting surrounds, centre, rear centre (eventually) and that potentially long runs were necessary. This is why i opted for the 12awg, based on his recommendation, and ended up getting 10awg Ultralink just b/c it was the same price so what the hell eh?

As for the impedance issues, i can attest to those problems based on my old system. In my less-informed days, i had picked up some cheap Radio Shack 22awg speaker wire (100 feet) and used it for 25 foot runs to surround speakers (Radio Shack Minimus 7s) and 6 foot runs to 2 front 6 ohm speakers.
Needless to say my stereo protection circuitry kept turning off the system. Sound was a bit crackly (music and volume dependant) and it all cleared up when i picked up some 18awg cable. I thought it was cable quality at the time but came to realize much more about the flow of stereo power since then.

Chess,

Don't be too hard on yourself. I used to think 30$ Sony Headphones were the best thing I ever heard!!! Oh my, I was so young and stupid...

Hi Chesserro, Ravi, JohnK thank you very much for your inputs, I just computed the cable run length to my surround speakers and the maximum legth will be 34ft, and in order to be in safe position, i'll just use the 12ga. My speakers had arrive yesterday, unfortunately one of the surround seems contains some loose object inside. Anyway once again, thank you for all your input, I really appreciate it, I don;t want you guys fight/debate it's other because of this...so let's be cool.....:-)

seanandredj

As ravi pointed out - if you can find/get a really good deal on that 16 gage wire, then you just may want to buy it and just double up the runs! Twist together two runs of + and two runs of - and you would have wire that is roughly the equavalent of 12 gage. Or to put the size ratio another way.... The wire gauge is a logarithmic scale based on the cross sectional area of the wire. Each 3-gauge step in size corresponds to a doubling or halving of the cross sectional area. For example, going from 20 gauge to 17 gauge doubles the cross sectional area (which, by the way, halves the DC resistance).

If you are really bored with nothing else to do, here is some more reading about wire: Wire info

Good Luck

Randyman