How essential is the thickness of the speaker wire?

Hooking up a receiver with my sub, and two front speakers and center speaker.

I have some thin shitty speaker wire laying around so I'm using that and it sounds decent, but I recall this system sounding a lot better when I had a much thicker wire hooked up.

Is my memory fucking with me, or does the speaker wire make that much of a difference?

My father always told me the thicker the better when it comes to speaker wire.

I'm sure there are a few Audiophiles on here, So please enlighten me.

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Quality wire makes a hell of a lot of difference.

Used to work for Pioneer (a long, long time ago) and the geeks in the sound room would regularly have show days when trade buyers were brought round and they would show them tips and tricks on how to best set up systems...and the first part of the show would always be about the quality of speaker wire. It was never as noticeable with the home systems, but the car systems were massively different. The same set-up through 'skinny' wire was never as good as the heavier stuff.

I doubt there's that much difference between decent (affordable) wire and the oxy-free pure copper (stupidly expensive) stuff, but there certainly is between the 'string' and a wire of decent weight.

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That's what I was figuring.

I may have to stop being cheap and get some decent wire, What I have now is super thin, it's barely speaker wire.

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Wire is wire.

Thickness depends on how much RMS your putting through it.

Pencil thick wire is more than enough for anyone.

The shorter in length the better.

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Gauge and length are key. More power/longer wire = bigger gauge.
Using too small a gauge will result in substantial power loss.




I use 8 gauge for a 1200W 1ohm sub.

Last edited by Munson on 12-03-2008 at 05:16 AM

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Anyone have the headset that came with the 360? The speaker wire I'm using is thinner than that.

That might explain why I'm barely getting any power out of the sub, lol.

I watched The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe while the highs and mids were good, but lows were pretty bad, It didn't thump like I know this system is capable of, lol.

Thanks for the input guys.

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