i am looking to change my speaker cables. why? the ones i have are too short, they are a pain in the butt to tighten down (bare wire), they have corroded a bit, and they are forever becoming loose in my binding posts of my speakers. so anyway, my question is what is a good place to find some good quality speaker wire at good prices. my fondness for high dollar cables is waning, so i am looking in the couple hundred dollar range for my whole ht setup. must be able to have bananas on ends, preferably dual. let me know good websites and/or good priced brands. thanks.

Tinned copper wire should be a good choice against corrosion.
Try this http://www.knukonceptz.com/productMaster.cfm?Category=Speaker%20Wire

nice spiker, i feel this urge to get copper coated by silver, and i haven't found many places that have that within a respectable price range. have you tried that stuff that they have... this is what i have seen:
http://silversonic.com/docs/index.html
http://www.cobaltcable.com/
http://signalcable.com/index.html
http://www.haveinc.com/

The DH Labs, top link there, sells their cable by the foot as well, but not much less expensive than when they terminate it. I kind of like multiple networks reconnected at the ends rather than one run of stranded wire...

I don’t know the details but I’ve heard that tin bonds with copper better than silver does. That can mean more durability. One thing is for sure, tin coating would be cheaper than silver coating. If the protection is about the same with both materials, I know which one I’ll choose.

Home Despot sells 12 gauge oxygen-free speaker wire by the metre (probably by the foot or yard south of the 49th). I've used it exclusively in my main theatre for over a year. The only caveats are that i) it's pretty "stiff" stuff so running it in tight places / racks can be a pain and ii) that gauge of wire is just big enough to make it too big to fit into cheap "spring clip" speaker wire connectors on some amps / speakers. (In my case on NAD 2150 amps). In those cases end connectors of some type (rather than bare wire) come in handy.

Will you notice a difference in how they "sound" over anything else? I don't. Which is a good thing since to me all speaker wire sounds the same (ie. nothing added and nothing lost.)

Jeff Mackwood

i am torn between the philosophy of "engineered" wire and normal rope style wire. another thorn in my side is knowing that i can get monster cable for a huge discount. i have some 12gauge ofc original monster right now, and i am not dissatified with it, but i recently upgraded and noticed again that every binding post where i had the bare wire inserted was loose. plus, my amp is practically impossible to thread a low guage wire into seeing as they are so closely spaced apart. if you can squeeze it all in, then tightening is a pain. i end up having to move some of my speakers because my ht unfortunately cohabitates with our bar, so i am looking for pre-terminated (soldered) connections rather than bare wire that i must terminate. not that i am opposed to self-terminated if the cost is right, but typically buying the wire seperately and the connectors seperately and doing it yourself only saves a little money. i guess a little money on each termination would add up though.
i used to be more into wiring, but reality struck me and i thought why would i EVEN CONSIDER wiring which outcosts some of my components... most of my stuff is high end, while not being elitist, but most of all it is good and was a good price for me to get. that is what i want in wire, good and a good price. i know why there are ten-thousand speaker wire companies and that's because the profit is enormous. anyway, being an engineer i like to be able to compare different products based on specs/features and make an informed choice, with speaker wire there is hardly any comparison that relates to perceived quality.

[This message has been edited by curegeorg (edited April 29, 2004).]

ALL wire is "engineered" for it's intended current carrying needs and bandwidth needs. I would really trust the huge research and development facilities at a company like Belden over a small specialized cable company who almost certainly doesn't manufacture their own wire.

yeah i agree. i haven't found too much stuff on belden, but i did find some appealing prices for canare stuff. maybe i liked the design of the canare more, so many websites visited i forget now. if monster cable, audioquest, nordost, etc. were all junk then it seems like they would be out of business by now, so there is some validity to their products as well. my thought was that a lot of these companies ARE out sourcing their wire production so going with a small little outfit would save me a lot of money and get the same stuff as the big boys. i mean if it is all coming from the same source, then the lowest price is best. the high-end names have to charge more to compensate for the more that they spend on other stuff.

Take a look at this stuff. I have a pair of their Prism 2+2 speaker cable terminated on the speaker ends w/gold bananas and left bare into my 1050 (4-14ga. strands combined into two). www.taralabs.com
They have a dealer locator on the site. I paid $3.00/FT.+ bananas - (2) 8' cables cost me around $75! Great bang4thebuck!

I recently helped someone do a quick install of a moderately inexpensive Onkyo 6.1 system in their living room. A minor upgrade suggestion was the speaker wire. Besides having 12 gauge stranded speaker wire by the foot, or meter/metre as Jeff points out, some home improvement supply stores also had 250-foot rolls of the same stuff at a significant savings over the manually measured segment method. If you’re installing in an average living room, but you have to run cable the long way around because you can’t use the most direct route from amplifier to speakers, running a 6 or 7 speaker set-up will probably use up 150 to 200 feet of cable. Do the math before you buy. You might come out ahead and you could end up saving another trip to the store for more if your initial length needed estimates were off a bit.