Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater QS4 and speaker wire

Hello everyone,

I'Ve finaly made the plunge and bought 2 M50, 2 QS4 and 100 feet of 12G wire at Axiom. Considering i already ad the Ep125 and a JBL center channel, my HT is now complete.

My question goes as follow. For the surround (QS4) i have in wall monster cable wire. The run is about 25 feet /speaker and it's 18g. Should i upgrade to 12G? will it make a significant difference in sound?

Thank's

Forgive me if there's some spelling mistake, i'm a french canadian doing my best.

Going by this wire table you can go 30 ft. using 18 ga. into a 8 ohm load.You should be fine.

G, you should enjoy excellent sound from your M50s and QS4s. Time to again cite(it's been 6 minutes since Rick has done it) Mr. Russell's excellent article on speaker wire. From the table you can see that your present in-wall wire is adequate. There's no good reason to go to the trouble of changing and no difference in sound will result.

I'm going to reread that article tomorrow when I have a fresh mind. Some of his assertions just do not make sense from an electrical engineering stand point. Its late and maybe I'm missing something.

Smaller diameter cable (wire) has a higher resistance per unit length than does large diameter cable. A higher resistance means that you use up more of your power as heat in the wire rather than energy in your speaker. And, the input impedance to the amplifier is a little higher.

His listening test was not as scientific as we would like in today's environment (ie. double blind).

I suspect that what he was seeing was a result of the amplifiers response to its driving point impedance as a function of the difference cable. Different amplifier, you could get a different result.

Anyhow, I'm going to reread it tomorrow. This evening, something just doesn't read right. LOL!!!

Just one man's engineering opinion.

The Rat.