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.