Question about speaker wire lengths

[Ksyder]

I hooked up a set of z-5500's with all 5 speakers hooked up with very different speaker lengths. 2 of the speakers have about a 30'-35' cable run. The other 2 have roughly 20'-25' feet of cable and the shortest (nearest to the amplifier) has about a 15' speaker wire length.


It seems the speakers with longer speaker lengths which include one or two splices are a little quieter. All wire was freshly and cleanly stripped and twist and taped together for sake of convenience.

Would it be better to dump the cheap wire and use the same length for all wires no matter how far they are? Is this a problem?

Also how long can a coax digital cable be? I don't know exactly what they are but I know I need one to hook my dvd player up to the z5500s since the analog jacks are already used and the dvd has this coax output. DVD player is about 20 feet away.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

Differences in wire length should not be an issue unless you're talking about VERY long distances. Digital coax looks like a regular audio or video cable with RCA connectors. In theory any 75ohm cable should work.

Here's a 25' cable:
http://www.monoprice.com/produ..._id=621&seq=1&format=2

 

[Ksyder]

cool thank you. Can you go longer than 25" feet for the digital coax cable? They have the 50' for a dollar or so more... would this be o.k. in this instance? Reason being that I would like to run around 2 door jambs if possible to other corner of the room without having to have it snaked across the floor or anything like that.

http://www.monoprice.com/produ...id=2982&seq=1&format=2

Thanks for the heads up!

 

[PurdueRy]

http://www.monoprice.com/produ...id=2684&seq=1&format=2

If you're going to do 50ft I would get that...RG6 is a bit thicker than RG59 and will have less line loss. I am sure the other would probably work but I would want to just speng the $2 more and make sure that I'm not going to get any bit errors.

 

[spidey07]

At those lengths, cheap/thin speaker wire is going to give you a lower sound. Any decent 12 gauge speaker wire will alleviate that.

 

[Ksyder]

is it worth it to redo the wiring for the z5500's? They have decent sound but I'm sure no audiophile is going to be impressed. I'm basically using the supplied speaker wire with some wire from an old Sony HTIB spliced in on the long runs. I'm mainly concerned that perhaps the splices are causing some added resistance to the point where it is noticeably quieter. I do not know if this is the reason for that or not.

Also, I've got a bundle of wires that include power for the pc and printer along with the 6 channel signal cables from the pc to the control pod. Is this going to cause interference? Could this be contributing to the problem I'm having? The wires are gently zip tied together just to keep things tidy but I'd guess this might not be good from a signal standpoint. This, however, didn't cross my mind at the time I was re-wiring my setup.

 

[sdifox]

before you run out to buy speaker cable, make sure you can fit the larger gauge into the speaker terminal. I am guessing it cannot handle anything bigger than 16GA. But the good news is, you don't need much bigger than that since you are not drawing a whole lot of current with those drivers anyway.


http://www.audioholics.com/edu...es/speaker-cable-gauge


rule of thumb for audio is keep power cable away from signal cable. If contact can not be avoided, make them perpendicular.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: spidey07
At those lengths, cheap/thin speaker wire is going to give you a lower sound. Any decent 12 gauge speaker wire will alleviate that.

You can get away with 16 gauge at anything less than 70'. I wouldn't normally nitpick, but there is a significant cost difference between 12 and 16. 16 is pretty thick - I don't think I was even able to fit 12-14 into my crimper when doing banana plugs.

I've run 35' easily with 16 gauge speaker cable.

I would think that the cables nearby the speaker cables _could_ be interfering, but I'm running a ton of cables near my receiver and haven't noticed any issues, so I'm guessing this might not be your problem. If I had to make a guess, it is the splices, as you have noted.

As for the digital coax run, you should be OK at 25 feet with 75ohm cable.

 

[Ksyder]

I have some 12 ga. wire lying around that I use to hook up subwoofers in my car. I took a piece and stripped it and it barely fits into the satellites I have. I twisted the end of the wire so the strands wouldn't separate when inserting. Ideally I'd like to tin the wire with some solder but then I don't think the 12 ga. would fit. I don't know what the ga. is of the supplied wire but I'd guess its 18 or 20 ga.

Thank you to everyone for sharing your thoughts/advice. Hopefully I'll be able to get this all sorted out soon. I posted some pics of the setup and the guys over on the other thread said it was all wrong. So its back to the drawing board.

 

[TidusZ]

Before we all get carried away buying cable, have you tried turning up the surround volume in the receiver settings? That turns up the volume of just the back speakers relative to the front.

 

[Ksyder]

yeah the surrounds were turned all the way up. The speakers that are the quietest are actually the two front left and right speakers.

 

[Rubycon]

At the power outputs of the included amplifier with these sets you can use any wire size without a problem. 18AWG is plenty.