Thinking of order speaker cables from BJC .. approx 200ft of their 12 guage.

Has anyone ordered from them that can advise of what the cost (shipping, duties ..) might cost me ?

I live in Markham btw.


thanks

Welcome Slitman,

I have ordered from Blue Jeans on mulitiple occasions and there are no extra charges such as duty, brokerage fees, taxes (pst, gst) etc. Shipping costs will be included at checkout. All my orders where shipped via USPS to Canada and then handled by Canada post. There is no extra charges, what you pay at checkout is the final cost shipped to your door. The package will come out of Seattle so it will take 7-10 days to receive the package once you get a shipping notice. Highly recommended company!

You can also consider the Axiom 12 awg speaker wire. The difference being you will probably get the wire sooner, a few cents more expensive, black in colour and more flexible. I find the Blue Jeans speaker cable quite stiff but it is excellent quality. If you go with the Blue Jeans wire you should also consider their locking banana plugs while you are at it.

I can second purchasing some of Axiom's own wire and their Banana plugs both are of high quality and the wire has the highest strand count I have seen, making it very flexible.

Thanks to everyone's reply.

I considered going with Axiom's wire. That being said this will be an in wall installation and plan on moving in the next 5 yrs or so. Other than flexibility, faster shipping and supporting a home grown business ... is there any notable audible difference between the two ? Guess what I'm driving at is it worth the spend considering I will be leaving behind when I move ?

There will be no audible differences between the Blue Jeans bulk 12 awg and Axioms bulk 12 awg wire in regards to sound quality. The only difference between the 2 will be looks (black, white or grey) and the "flexibility" of the wire.

As long as the speaker wire is of sufficient gauge to carry the power the amplifier is producing (both BJ's and Axiom's are), there will be no difference in sound.

Even with excessive resistance from too small a wire, the effect is an even attenuation of all audio frequencies (it'll just be quieter). Only through odd geometries or inlined circuits to alter the capacitance or inductance will a speaker wire take on different characters. That's totally undesirable, as a wire should not be a tone control.

Awesome that pretty much helps make my decision making the easier. So it will be either wires from BJC or Monoprice.

Given that I want to keep costs to a minimum will in all likelihood go with Monoprice.

Sounds good. Monoprice is another good option.

if you're going to leave it behind, I second Monoprice, or even Home Depot or some other home center. Any 12 ga. wire will be virtually the same sound quality.

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

That was an interesting read. Like how they tried to "bully" the smaller player only to have them come back and bite them in the ass. Don't think they were expecting such a response and from an experienced lawyer of all things.

Kurt Denke is a smart guy. It is an excellent response. Always a fun read.

That letter is one of the best reads out there, no matter how many times I see it brought up it makes me smile.

I forgot about that one. Hopefully, Mr. Denke has had his letter framed and placed on display in the lobby of his head office.

I don't have any pix handy, sorry. I'll try to remember to snap a few tonight.

I bought these. I slid about an inch of shrink tubing on the speaker wire, then ran the wire into the base of the banana plug. Secured the wire with the screw, then slipped the shrink tubing back down onto the end of the banana plug so that about a quarter inch was on the plug, and the rest was down the speaker wire. Used a heat gun to shrink it down. Pretty easy.

Some of the connections look better than others. But overall it looks "good enough" for me. It was worth the small investment (~$20) in plugs, shrink tubing, and techflex, and the afternoon of my time to build all the speaker interconnects that I wanted.

The TechFlex was what really makes the cables stand out. Well worth the couple of bucks to sheath the wires in this stuff. It's purely cosmetic, of course, but it really is a nice finishing touch. In fact, one of my long-standing "oughta-do-that" projects is to buy a bunch of large-diameter wrap-around tech flex and bundle up *everything* behind my AV rack. Would go a long way in cleaning up the rat's nest of wires that are back there....

So you've got it over the individual wires+plugs, not over the wire sheath+wires, right? I tried to do both.

I'm with Peter.. I've got the same quad star speaker cables, interconnectc, sub cables etc.. I really like the quality look and feel of the BlueJeans products. Professional grade at an affordable price.

Kurt Denke(BJC pres) should sell signed and framed copies of this on Blue Jeans website...I think we gots a winner!

In addition to speaker wire, I bought banana plugs for connection to my receiver from monoprice as well. I used the supplied black and red heat shrink stuff.

Not the best pic, but here is a pic of the end result: I didn't really know what I was doing but it turned out ok.

You label your cables? What are you, smart?

Hah,

I always keep a AA battery handy, my labeling skills are terrible.

Yeah, I figured I would be disconnecting the cables occasionally for cleaning/ect. and all of my cables are zip tied together. As a result I couldn't really tell the cables apart so I figured labeling them would be helpful.

I would not play poker with Kurt Denke - talk about calling somebody's bluff. I get a very real sense that "He ain't playin"