Thanks everyone for your patience. I have a million questions and some of these are non-conventional, but hey I don't know the answer.

When using wire to a pair of speakers, does the length for both need to be exactly the same? I know that with many of the audio delay features on receivers, you can compensate for different wire lengths between fronts, centers, surrounds, etc. But what about the wire length between your two front speakers? Do many of you buy speaker wire premade at a certain length, or do you cut it yourself?

I bought Axiom's bulk wire, I highly recommend it very flexible, easy to work with and it doesn't set off my phobia for clear plastic covered coathanger wire .

No need to worry about the lengths being different, I think they would have to vary by over 100' before you would ever start to imagine you heard a difference.

I can't think of any technical reason for matching speaker wire lengths unless you were worried about tiny differences in capacitance somehow affecting your response in some infintesmal way.

IIRC, signals travel at 1/2 to 2/3 speed of light in a typical cable, ie perhaps 600,000 times as fast as sound. The finest adjustment in the receiver is probably on the order of a millisecond, which corresponds to about 100 MILES of speaker wire.

There are so many good things to worry about. This isn't one of them

When I worry about speaker wire length the most is when I say "So I cut it again, and it's Still Too Short!"

Finally something I don't have to worry about!

Thanks guys.

Yes, TNT, as Rich(F107)indicates, the thing to worry about is speaker wires too short(has a drastic affect on sound quality)rather than uneven in length.

TNT - trot on down to Home Depot and pick up a length of 14 ga. wire (they will cut it in their bulk area to whatever length you want). It's $.25/ft. and works just fine.

Ray

Not to stir things up, because I agree with the sentiment here, but I was just reading the owners manual for H/K 3480 stereo receiver and they recommend that the wire be the same length for each speaker. Check out page 12, third column, second paragraph.

http://manuals.harman.com/hk/Owner%27s%20Manual/HK3480%20OM.pdf

[Edit: I had the page wrong, it should be page 12]

How very wierd. I looked in my HK 3270 manual (predecessor to the 3480) and it says the same thing.

"This message brought to you by the United Speaker Wire Confederation of America"

Good catch, although I still don't believe it makes a difference to the sound

HK's manuals probably stipulate even wire lengths because you never know when someone's going to use 30ga. wire. (look - a single CAT5 cable has enough wires to do my whole system!)

Like Ford Prefect - I bought Axiom cable, not for how they would affect the sound, but for looks (at least half my cable is exposed) and for ease of use (it's soft and pliable like buttah)... I easily could have gotten away with 14ga. lamp cord or even romex based on the length of my runs, but I appreciate the look of the Axiom stuff... and it was comparable in price to the bulk transparent pink stuff from the electronics store (even with my jobber's rate).

Bren R.

I've the same question rasied before and Alan has pointed out my misconception.

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Another question, does the speaker cables has to be same length for both Left and right QS4 ? I know it has to be on the front L & R but I don't know whether this matters for the surround. I intend to put my recevier on the side wall, so one QS4 has to be 10- 12 feet longer than the other one.
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Here's the answer by Alan Loft
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12/10/04 04:41 PM
Hi romeo,

The cables for the front channels do NOT have to be the same length, nor do they for any other channels either. That's just a ruse retailers used to sell more Monster, Kimber and other stuff. Use 12-gauge for runs over 15 feet, 14-gauge for shorter runs; that will reduce resistance to insignificant levels so just measure out the lengths you need to each speaker.

For short runs, 10 feet and less, you can use 16 gauge.

Regards,

Alan Lofft
Axiom Resident Expert
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Makes sense. If you used speaker cable that was much too small then you might want matched lengths. Then again, I think I would STILL want the shortest lengths possible -- at least that way the speaker on the shorter run would sound a bit *better* even if it didn't sound the same.