I chose to go the route I have for speaker cables because I love efficiency and fidelity. A short discussion on efficiency, with regard to delivering the watts per channel you bought to the speakers:

In this example, let us assume that we have an amplifier capable of delivering 240 watts to a six ohm (nominal) load, the speaker. But in between the amplifier and the speaker is 100 feet of wire, fifty feet out and fifty feet back. The cable run to the average center and main speakers will be less, the average run to rear speakers may be more. If the cable presents a resistance of 0.1 ohms, the load on the amplifier is now 6.1 ohms. If the resistance of the cable is 0.5 ohms, the load is 6.5 ohms. If the cable resistance is 1 ohm, the load is 7 ohms. In simplistic terms, the higher the total impedance, the fewer watts are output from the amplifier. The higher the cable resistance, the more watts are spent in the cable itself. I have done a large table with a graph on a spreadsheet to see detailed results, but here is a small example:


PW6 - S/C - Wout - Wcbl - Wspkr - Loss

240___6.1___237____4____233______3%

240___6.5___222___17____205_____15%

240___7.0___206___29____177_____27%

PW6 = Potential Watts at 6 ohm load
S/C = Load of Speaker and Cable, ohms
Wout = Watts output by the amp for the load
Wcbl = Watts used within the cable itself
Wspkr = Watts delivered at the speaker
Loss = compared to potential Watts

I know that in decibels, dropping from 240 watts to say 205 is just a pittance. But you know what? If I spend double the money to gain double the watts, as in the Outlaw 770 compared to the new 7100, in order to gain three decibels, I don’t want a significant percentage of that eaten up by the effects of cable resistance. And if you use the new 7100, how much loss would you like? The percentage of loss given above is still valid no matter how many watts per channel you start out with.

Also, keeping the speaker cable resistance to a minimum is critical in order to maintain the damping factor of the amplifier.

Anyway, these are my reasons for extra effort in keeping the resistance between amplifier and speaker to a minimum, within a reasonable budget.


[This message has been edited by bestbang4thebuck (edited March 22, 2003).]

If you didn't fix things that weren't broken there'd never be any progress made

Or you just have to redefine what "broken" means... I'm guilty of defining broken as something less than absolutly perfect... but oh well

Copper wire will run about 0.18 ohms for 100 feet (!) of 12 gauge. If you want 0.1 (what you'll get with your coax if I read the post correctly) 10 gauge copper will do that. If you want even less, try 8 or 6 gauge at 0.07 and 0.05.

If you have a really, really, really, long run, maybe consider an amp with balanced inputs and locate it closer to the action....

[This message has been edited by charlie (edited March 23, 2003).]

I'd go with 12 ga wire. I checked Belden's site and the 8251 runs 1.1 ohm/1000'. For 2 wires (back and forth) it will be 2.2 ohm/1000'. I think 12 gauge wire runs 1.6 ohms (or so depending on temp) for a round trip. So I think the 12 ga will actually give a slightly lower resistivity. It's going to be a lot easier to work with too.