Since everyone was gracious enough to tell me about their speakers...I am curious about speaker cable. It seems, from some of the things I have read, that it can make a huge difference in sound quality. Has anyone noticed a change in the sound when using, or changing, their speaker cable? More specifically, has anyone tried the SP-200 speaker cable from AV123?

Thanks all!

Incog

It makes a huge difference in sound when I'm using a speaker cable verses when I'm not.

At one point in my life, I delved into inexpensive boutique wire. I had Apeture wire that resembled Monster cable, or the big stuff at Home Depot. I went to MITerminator cable, with the "Box" along the cable. I did not notice any difference. I still have those....in their box in the attic. I now run Taralabs Prism 2+2 bi-wire. I bought that when I had B&W 602's and decided to bi-wire them. Another waste IMO!

Point: don't blow a big portion of your budget on "Snake oil". Buy decent quality cable (such as what Ascend Acoustics has on their website), but use the money to upgrade other areas of your system instead.

The expensive stuff looks nice, but I ain't lookin' at 'em, I'm listenin' to 'em!

There’s been a fair amount of discussion about speaker cables in the Saloon. At one end of the spectrum you've got people who believe a cable shoot-out analysis that showed that round-jacket, 14-gauge extension cord wire from Home Depot performed admirably even when compared to some very high dollar wire. At the other end, you’ve got people buying or custom-making some interesting and expensive constructions, based on electronic practice usually associated mostly with ‘radio frequency’ current, which they swear made an immediate and great improvement using all kinds of descriptive words about how it affected their soundstage. Then you’ve got accessories, like little ‘tripods,’ from people who say, “… laying audio cables on an artificial fiber carpet will immediately dull the sound of your stereo.” Who are you going to believe?

Coming from an engineering background, I would say that the number one important characteristic of speaker cable, beyond such things as ‘it shouldn’t short out,’ is low resistance between amplifier and loudspeaker. One aspect of an amplifier's ability to control a loudspeaker is its damping factor. If you add as much as 10% or 20% of a loudspeaker’s impedance as a resistance between the amp and the speaker, the effective damping factor to the loudspeaker really starts falling off. This is also true of the effective watts delivered to the loudspeakers.

Since I just had be non-conformist, and I wanted to save money, I bought a reel of surplus video cable online. I didn’t care much about the center conductor, I wasn’t going to use it anyway, but the double layer, silver tinned copper shield has a resistance of 1.1 ohms per 1000 feet. That means, for a speaker run of 50 feet, the signal travels 100 feet round trip and the cable interjects only 0.11 ohms in the signal path. That’s about 2% of the impedance for a 6-ohm nominal rated loudspeaker. As a secondary and very minor feature of using this cable, ‘skin effect’ arguments become unnecessary because I’m essentially using a flexible, hollow ‘pipe’ as my conductor. If this made a difference to audio-frequency signals it would be more than a minor issue, but the fact that people don’t argue with me about skin effect in my cable is a nice feature.

I use cobalt speaker cable that replaced some cheap monster cable. http://www.cobaltcable.com/product/speaker_cables.htm.
not sure if I heard a difference or not but it is well made and looks cool...

Incognito:

I found this cable interesting so I made a 7’ pair.
http://www.venhaus1.com/diycatfivecables.html
If you want to try them yourself, send me a private message.

Ratshack 12 gauge. I used the savings on some nice banana plugs and a college fund.

Carol Superflex 12ga from Home Depot. It runs $.44/ft. Don't waste your money on hi-end marketing, it's hype, pure and simple.

I bought 2 50 ft. 14 ga spools of monster on sale a year ago, only $19.99 per spool. It works well for home theatre because it is thin enough to hide, but a low enough ga to give a decent sound.

By the way, how rude of me. I am new to the sight have only been posting for a couple of days, but have been completely stoked on my 950/7100 set up for a year now, just call me
Spatula.

I've tried Monster XP cable and cheap stuff from Home Depot. Couldn't hear a difference. Monster cable was flexible as a shoelace, but that was the only difference I could see. Home Depot wire was noticeably stiffer, but still plenty flexible for me.