i just ordered 170ft of 20ga and 130ft 17ga solid fine silver wire from Hoover and Strong for approx. $260 total. this should be enough for my front three speakers bi-wired, considering the center is only going to need tweeter because it has built-in amp already for subs in it. i am going to use the 20ga for high and 17ga for low in a four cable grouping for each positive and negative input. so that will give me 8 20ga wires for the highs, and 8 17ga wires for the lows for each speaker, except the center which will only need 8 20s for the highs. i am giving myself two extra feet on each gauge, just in case i botch something up.
their website is http://www.hooverandstrong.com/mill/roundwire_specs.htm
i am getting ready to order some ptfe spaghetti tubing from mcmaster to use as insulation for both gauges which is running $35.60 before shipping. their site is http://www.mcmaster.com/
my thoughts were to run the 4 conductor array through a slice of wooden dowel (dowel slice every foot or so) in order to keep the wires apart from one another. wooden dowel because it is way cheaper than a ptfe dowel and easier to work with.
then im going to heatshrink tube the whole dowel slice/insulated wire assembly, so that no other wires that the speaker cables bump into will damage the array of wires inside. i think i am going to use polyolefin heatshrink, since its easier to shrink that ptfe, more flexible, and less expensive. i have to see how far apart the spacing is going to be for the wires to determine what diameter dowel and respective heat shrink, or id price it now too.
finally, i am going to terminate each 4 conductor group with AUDIOQUEST CRIMP-BFA-S
bananas at the speaker end. using the same bananas i am going to crimp the 8 wires from the positive group and 8 from negative group each into its own banana at the amp end. these are $15 for 4, which is a freaking crime, but i need crimpers and i need silver, and i couldnt find any others out there. though i will look some more.
i thought about putting some polyester type mesh on top of the heatshrink tubing to protect it from tears, etc., but i dont know how much ill be spending to get everything else, so i may not do that depending on price. so for each speaker im going to end up with 8 20ga for the highs and 8 17ga for the lows (solid fine silver). which works out to 14awg to each (positive and negative) treble input and 11awg to each low frequency input. total awg per positive and negative connection (i.e. comparison to a normal non-bi-wired cable) would be 9.5awg.
i picked 20ga because it is the first gauge to not suffer from "skin effect" which only affects treble, i picked 17ga because i wanted to stay close to 20 like the trebles, but desired a thicker cable for bass response.
i think this is going to be awesome when i get them together. 9.5awg of silver would be enough, but since it is multiple wires there is no "skin effect" or inter-strandular interference on a cable that would be just one wire of 9.5awg.
ill repost with some more specs once i decide on everything else.