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Quick question regarding speaker cabling

pillage2001

pillage2001

Lifer
Mum wants me to hook the speakers to the amp but the speaker cables are not labelled, as in the two wires have the same color and do not denote the polarity. Does it matter if I screw up and connect them wrongly? Would the speakers blow up?
 
careful... sometimes it can cause issues..

I would stick to the same color .. look for a stripe.. it has to have a stripe.. or a ridge (one has one and the other doesnt)...

if not just test it with a multimeter.
 
Most amps and speakers are polarized, thus positive goes to positive, negative to negative, if you hook them up back wards, the sound will be muffled and the amps efficiency will be out the door.
 
ah well....

apparently everyone disagree w/ me. i set up the speakers in our living room in college (5 of them), we had wharfedales and since we didn't have enough speaker cable and didn't want to dish out the money for nice cabling, I used ethernet cable (free from the computer lab) and hooked up 4 of the 5 speakers using those. didn't pay any attention to polarity from amp to speakers.

sound was perfect, we even did a test to see if normal speaker cable would make a difference by hooking one of the speakers up with the good speaker cable, as well as reversing polarity etc etc. sounded the same. and no, none of us are deaf!
 
Electrical engineers perspective:

Getting the polarity wrong is okay, as long as it is wrong for both speakers. If the polarity is the opposite for each speaker, then you will have sound that is out of phase, which a decent ear will detect. The sound will be diffuse and directionless.

Using small gauge wire like 10B-T cable is fine, as long as the lengths are short, and you are not pushing a lot of power through them. They have higher impedance, so you will lose some high frequency content, and may even cause impedance mismatch at the amplifier's terminals (noticable at high volumes). I am not a proponent of O2 free Cu cable, or welding cables to my speakers, common sense and a good foundation of the physics of what's going on is helpful.

HTH 🙂
 
Getting the polarity wrong is okay, as long as it is wrong for both speakers.
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Then it's out of absolute phase. This is also a no no.

It's not difficult to maintain correct polarity throughout.

Cheers!
 
How long are these lengths of unmarked speaker cables? And what guage?

If they're not insanely long, take a Sharpie and mark one one of the wires on one end of the cable, then take your thumb and index finger and trace that wire to the other end of the cable and mark it. Guage is important here because the smaller guages will be hard to trace.
 
Originally posted by: ATLien247
How long are these lengths of unmarked speaker cables? And what guage?

If they're not insanely long, take a Sharpie and mark one one of the wires on one end of the cable, then take your thumb and index finger and trace that wire to the other end of the cable and mark it. Guage is important here because the smaller guages will be hard to trace.
Click to expand...

NAw, they're not insanely long and I'm not sure why the cables aren't marked. I might need to look harder into it to see if it's really not marked. I might have been faded.

I know it's theoretically wrong to get the polarity wrong but not sure what will happen. 😀 THanks for the response guys. 😀
 
they have to be marked somehow... either with one being textured or printed on... the wire i ordered doesn't look like it is marked, but the manufacturer's name is in tiny print on just one of the two wires.
 
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