Nate Lanxon
Nate Lanxon is CNET UK's Senior Editor of News and Features, and covers every aspect of technology for Crave. He also enjoys popular-science books, obscure Japanese animation and plays 'technical metal' on the drums, whatever that is.
Thursday 2 August 2007, 5:24pm
Why decent speaker wire is vitally important
While you're busy worrying about which MP3 player offers the best sound, which mini hi-fi system has the best speakers and which headphones boast the best performance, you may overlook something you consider superfluous: speaker wire. Seriously, it's more important than you might think...
Believe it or not, poor-quality speaker wire can make even a £5,000 set of speakers sound no better than a £100 pair, and typically, general consumer-grade audio equipment comes with pretty poor wiring. It's a shame, because some manufacturers could be inhibiting the peak performance of their hardware by supplying cheaper cabling.
So what should you look for? Take, for example, a cheap wiring option available on eBay. For fairness, we got some of this cable in, and guffawed relentlessly and derisively at its shoddiness. It cost £1.50 for 20m. Quite understandably, this seems like an amazing deal to Joe Public, who is oblivious to how terrible speaker wire of this 'quality' really is. The advert in question had this as its pitch: '20M/66ft High Quality Speaker Wire'. Let me just make one thing very clear: any speaker wire that costs £1.50 for 20m is not high quality. Maybe if you compared it to string.
For my home system, I use IXOS XHS806W. At its current cost, a couple of 4m lengths will set you back somewhere in the region of £25. So 20m will cost around £70 -- quite a jump from the cheap £1.50 cable of the same length. Accordingly, the jump in quality is phenomenal, and noticeably better than the wire you may get with the average system. If you care enough about the quality of your music to invest a few hundred pounds in a rig of audio separates, splashing out £30 on some excellent wire shouldn't be overlooked.
Comments on this post
The claims you make are not supported by what experimental work has been done. There is no, repeat no, case of a proper double-blind test where anyone can reliably tell the difference between high end speaker wire and generic stuff. Nada.
Posted by Andy Barss on Thu 13 September, 2007 5:23 PM
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Fair comment, and many, many people would argue that you're correct (probably the same people that argue lossless audio formats are pointless). However, I have plenty of speaker wire here that would make even the hardest sceptic humble. While it's true that any good manufacturer will ship cable that meets generally good standards, there are significantly better and worse wires out there, and people charge customers for it all the time.
Posted by Nate Lanxon, CNET.co.uk on Thu 13 September, 2007 5:38 PM
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I'm sure that you have many speaker wires that sound better than others. This had to to with the lenght and thickness of the wire. Wire is simply a conduit between your amp and speakers, the thicker the wire the lower it's resistance is. Most systems come with VERY thin wire that has too much resistance to pass the signal from the amp to the speaker accurately. Remember, speaker wire cannot improve the signal the they are given or make it faster or stronger, they can only pass it along accurately. The ONLY scientific reason for the difference in wires is the gague, but people who spend $500 for audio cables really want to hear a diffenence to justify the cost, so they do.
Posted by Josh Stein on Sun 16 September, 2007 9:20 AM
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This is absolute trash. I have been a keen true hifi enthusiast for many years and have had literally hundreds of systems. While it's obvious you can hear every nuance of difference when changing amplifiers and there are enormous changes between sourses and speakers, any suitable low resistance cable with a correct amp rating and low capacitance is damn near impossible to destinguish between and expensive cables are mainly phsycoachoustic enancements. If you pay more you will want to believe it sounds better. Read any of the more truthfull articles on the internet and don't be sooked in by the phantom cable manufacturers sales jargon.
Posted by Gordon anderson on Sun 28 October, 2007 11:54 PM
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Consider this; signal or current will always like water, travel at the least point of resistance to the source you are transferring it to. Since current flows on the outer diameter of a cable the ideal would be a solid core. This is not practical as there is no flexibility for the cable, so manufacturers of decent hifi signal cable overcome this by building in as many cores as possible, often in excess of 300 to simulate solidity, for a decent hifi amplifier and decent speakers you should aim for at least a 2.5mm cable to avoid any signal loss. If it is an MP3 player system then it won't matter because the output is crap anyway, just use some bell wire or old mains cable because essentially you are going nowhere.
Posted by jim on Thu 27 December, 2007 11:28 PM
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A sad day indeed when people in positions of power perpetuate foolish myths. The gauge of the cable makes a difference depending on the length of the wire...that's it. If you sincerely believe you can tell the difference between lamp wire and $16000 pear audio cables, james randi is willing to give you $1 000 000. Do us a favour and take up the challenge if you sincerely believe the thrash you just published.
Posted by Julio on Thu 19 February, 2009 9:17 PM
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