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