What kind of wire do you use to connect your equipment?

Travis Ballstadt · Apr 30, 2018

For speakers, I bought a spool from Monoprice when I did my last theater remodel and ran it in the walls.

For audio interconnects, I have a Rubbermaid tub of cables I bought back in the late 90s that is full of "good" analog interconnects that have been retired at one point as things moved to optical/coax, then HDMI. They range from Audioquest to Monster to whatever Circuit City/The Good Guys/Best Buy had on hand when I needed something.

Honestly, though, I'm only using analog interconnects in one place, and that's from my turntable to preamp and preamp to a cheap Monoprice tube amp.

I guess I'd be curious to learn if cables "age", or if there has been some massive revelation in cable technology that I'm missing out on something with my 20yo cables.

Travis Ballstadt · Apr 30, 2018

thrillcat said:
Honestly, though, I'm only using analog interconnects in one place, and that's from my turntable to preamp and preamp to a cheap Monoprice tube amp.

Oops. Two places. That setup and between the Emotiva XMC-1 and Emotiva UPA-700. I bought a 7-channel interconnect from Emotiva when I ordered the amp and earlier processor. They seem like a rebranded Monoprice cable, frankly.

The original 7ch interconnect developed a short in one channel, I emailed Emotiva about it and they overnighted a replacement. Turns out they have a lifetime warranty.

NBPK402 · May 19, 2018

I buy my speaker wire from Monoprice by the roll. I usually get the white or black sheathed 12 gauge wire, and then install Speakon connectors.

Jack · Feb 4, 2019

Very interesting discussion and I am not going to get into theory here because I am not qualified to, so all my choices are made by listing to different products. Oh and YES Thrillcat, cables can age. I had an old set of the original clear Monster speaker cables in my bin o stuff and found that the internals were turning green and black in some areas. This is not only Monster that does this, I had a roll of plain old clear covered 12 gauge wire and it too was green. So there is that.

I use Anti Cable Doubles 12 gauge speaker wire which results in an effective gauge of 9.
I use Anti Cable Interconnects on some equipment but not all.
For my main interconnects I use Blue Jeans LC1
For ancillary speakers I use Blue Jean Speaker cables.

I tried Monoprice interconnects and they did not speak to me.

I did use Monoprice 14 gauge for surrounds as they seem not as important to me.

Grayson Dere · Feb 4, 2019

Currently I'm using Audioquest Forest for my interconnects and Best Buy brand 'Rocketfish' 16 AWG speaker wire for all my 5 channels.

I've been wanting to try more expensive wiring/cable but I just keep telling myself as long as what I'm using is well made and sounds fine then just be happy with it : )

Matthew J Poes · Feb 4, 2019

I have a lot of blue jeans cables. Very well made and technically more than adequate. Great product in my opinion.

I’ve used a lot of different cables and cable designs over the years. In the end I have found that the fancy cables never bettered good normal cables. However some exotic designs made things worse because the design had such extreme fundamental flaws that it caused serious detriment over distance.

For example, I had an exotic litz cable that I used for my surrounds. It was 16 gauge and my runs were like 30ft each. I used them for a few years without thinking much about it. The cable was bought in bulk at a reasonable price, but it’s normal finished product price would be quite high. I decided to measure them along with other cables and found that they had extremely high inductance and caused severe phase rotation. It also has many times the resistance of a normal piece of 16 gauge wire.

I also had some cable that was made similar to Audioquest using lots of individual silver and copper conductors in a variety of gauges with thin insulation in a kind of circular twisted array. It had unusually high capacitance and unusual phase behavior. It was bulky for the gauge and hard to work with.

Point is, I’ve had exotic cables, I’ve never heard a difference, I’ve measured differences and they aren’t good, so if you have the itch, I’d save that money and put it toward something else.

Grayson Dere · Feb 4, 2019

Matthew J Poes said:
I have a lot of blue jeans cables. Very well made and technically more than adequate. Great product in my opinion.

I’ve used a lot of different cables and cable designs over the years. In the end I have found that the fancy cables never bettered good normal cables. However some exotic designs made things worse because the design had such extreme fundamental flaws that it caused serious detriment over distance.

For example, I had an exotic litz cable that I used for my surrounds. It was 16 gauge and my runs were like 30ft each. I used them for a few years without thinking much about it. The cable was bought in bulk at a reasonable price, but it’s normal finished product price would be quite high. I decided to measure them along with other cables and found that they had extremely high inductance and caused severe phase rotation. It also has many times the resistance of a normal piece of 16 gauge wire.

I also had some cable that was made similar to Audioquest using lots of individual silver and copper conductors in a variety of gauges with thin insulation in a kind of circular twisted array. It had unusually high capacitance and unusual phase behavior. It was bulky for the gauge and hard to work with.

Point is, I’ve had exotic cables, I’ve never heard a difference, I’ve measured differences and they aren’t good, so if you have the itch, I’d save that money and put it toward something else.

Have you had any experience with High Fidelity Cables? They use magnetism to focus the audio signal...somehow.
http://www.highfidelitycables.com/technology.html

Matthew J Poes · Feb 4, 2019

Grayson Dere said:
Have you had any experience with High Fidelity Cables? They use magnetism to focus the audio signal...somehow.
http://www.highfidelitycables.com/technology.html

No, but....that sounds kind of silly too. That is like applying concepts from particle accelerators to speaker cables in a useless way.

Wayne A. Pflughaupt · Feb 4, 2019

Jack said:
I had an old set of the original clear Monster speaker cables in my bin o stuff and found that the internals were turning green and black in some areas. This is not only Monster that does this, I had a roll of plain old clear covered 12 gauge wire and it too was green. So there is that.

All that is, is a surface chemical reaction between the insulating material and the copper. The wire is fine underneath. That stuff does look scary though...

Regards,
Wayne

JStewart · Feb 4, 2019

Matthew J Poes said:
I decided to measure them along with other cables and found that they had extremely high inductance and caused severe phase rotation. It also has many times the resistance of a normal piece of 16 gauge wire.

I also had some cable that was made similar to Audioquest using lots of individual silver and copper conductors in a variety of gauges with thin insulation in a kind of circular twisted array. It had unusually high capacitance and unusual phase behavior. It was bulky for the gauge and hard to work with.

Interesting stuff. I would never have considered wire causing those types of issues.

Grayson Dere · Feb 4, 2019

Matthew J Poes said:
No, but....that sounds kind of silly too. That is like applying concepts from particle accelerators to speaker cables in a useless way.

Wayne A. Pflughaupt said:
All that is, is a surface chemical reaction between the insulating material and the copper. The wire is fine underneath. That stuff does look scary though...

Regards,
Wayne

I've seen this occur in some of my older speaker wire, too. It's good to know it's all okay underneath : ) Does this occur because some air got inside the insulation?

Tony V. · Feb 4, 2019

yes, air and moisture.
If you live in a dry climate "cable rot" is far less an issue.

ddude003 · Feb 4, 2019

Consider that when copper oxidizes the oxidized portion is no longer a conductor of electricity... The oxidized material is a loss of size (gage) of the wire... Performance characteristics of the cable change...

Speaker cable performance, exotics included, interface from speaker to amplifier need taken into consideration... How are Negative Feedback designs and Damping Factors of amplifiers effected when resistance and capacitance change from one cable design to another...

ddude003 · Feb 4, 2019

Grayson Dere said:
Have you had any experience with High Fidelity Cables? They use magnetism to focus the audio signal...somehow.
http://www.highfidelitycables.com/technology.html

I have not looked at this design although a Power Choke or Inductor comes to mind... Filtering RF or DC in some way??? Maxwell, Tesla and Faraday ghosts...

dc2bluelight · Feb 5, 2019

Grayson Dere said:
Have you had any experience with High Fidelity Cables? They use magnetism to focus the audio signal...somehow.
http://www.highfidelitycables.com/technology.html

They accurately state a few principles of physics, then they miss-apply those principles in a way that is nothing but pseudoscience and marketing.

"So if we use a magnetic conductor instead of a regular conductor, we can guide the electrons (the audio signal) through the conductor in a very precise way to reduce distortion and signal loss."

Realizing, of course, that given proper system design, the very dead-last possible cause of "loss" and distortion would be cable.

If you wonder what their "science" really is, just check the price of one meter of CT-1 cable: $20,900. And you need two for stereo. Somewhere around $100,000 - $150,000 for a set of reasonable length wires for a 5.1 system.

When it comes to exotic cables, the cost per meter is directly proportional to the marketing falsehoods.

tesseract · Feb 5, 2019

Low level signals are handled by Monoprice HDMI into my Emotiva pre/pro and Emotiva XLR out to my amps. The only exception is the captive RCA cable from my h/k turntable into the Pro-Ject phono pre and the Acoustic Research cheapy cable fro the phono pre to the pre/pro.

For high-level signals, I use MIT AVt-1 biwire-capable to my mains and Monster XP to my center and surrounds.

NBPK402 · Aug 19, 2023

Lately I have been buying "The world's best cables" from Amazon. I use their XLR cables which are made using Canare and also Mogami. I also am going to use some 12TC speaker wire I am picking up off of eBay to rewire my speakers internally and from the power amp to the speaker drivers. I am hoping to hear differences that I want to use for specific drivers and then wire from the power amp to each individual driver (as an example....using 1 from the amp to the speaker cabinet and then another to each individual driver..with say 12tc for my compression driver and maybe Mogami for my woofers, etc.)

What kind of wire do you use to connect your equipment?

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