Speaker Cables

Hi-Fi purists make a lot of noise about speaker cables, sometimes spending several hundreds of pounds on a metre of specialist cable. However, the main function of speaker cable is to provide a low-resistance path between the amplifier and the loudspeaker, so thin bell wire is obviously a bad idea – not only will thin wire take some of your amplifiers power and turn it into heat, it will markedly reduce the damping factor of the amplifier.

Without getting too technical, the damping factor of an amplifier is its ability to sink the current being produced when a loudspeaker overshoots its position and starts to function as a generator rather than a motor; thus the amplifier damps the speaker movement, keeping it under control – producing a tighter more accurate bass end.

The most pragmatic approach is to use the shortest speaker leads you can, make sure they are both the same length, and choose heavier cable.

The simple matter about speaker cables is that by far the most important element is the cables resistance. Resistance is not everything, capacitance, inductance and other poindexter-type wire qualities do play their role, but none of them matter until the resistance is bought under control. Generally, you should think in terms of the resistance as being about 75% of any speaker cables performance.

To simplify, resistance can be thought of as the size of a pipe in a plumbing system. The bigger the pipe, the more water it can pass and the lower the resistance. The smaller the pipe, the less water it can pass and thus higher resistance. Resistance is a function not only of size but length too – therefore the longer your cable the more resistance it will have. The moral of this story is, the lower resistance a speaker cable has, the more signal it will allow to pass through.

The basic way to lower the resistance is to increase the amount (gauge) of wire used. Wire is typically measured in gauge, i.e. number of strands inside the cable.

We would recommend nothing less than a 42 strand, 79 strands being the most popular but gauges up to 252 strands are available.

Speaker cable is a minefield of conflicting information; many manufacturers claiming all manner of results, which cannot be electrically tested (very convenient), only when listening will one be able to experience the difference (obviously with the help of the placebo effect and an over zealous salesman).

Bi-Wire

At this point we fell we should mention bi-wiring, this is a system which uses a separate low and high frequency speaker signal being sent from a bi-wired amplifier to a pair of bi-wired speakers.

The principle being that your speaker has at least two drivers, a bass driver and a treble driver (tweeter) – speakers with this b-wire input are designed to accept separate low frequency (bass) and high frequency (treble) signals from your amplifier. Thus allowing each separate driver in the speaker to only receive the frequencies that it intends to output, i.e. your bass driver is only sent the bass sounds of any music playing and thus the bass driver does not try to reproduce the treble frequencies and can therefore produces a tighter, crisper and timely bass with the reverse being true for the treble.

So how can we summarise Speaker Cables?

1. Speaker cable cannot make your system any better – only reduce the amount of loss.
2. Shorter cable lengths where possible – the longer the cable the more signal loss.
3. Longer lengths double the gauge of cable. (i.e. short runs being made in a 79 strand, therefore for the longer runs double the gauge and use an 168 strand.)
4. If you have an amplifier and speakers that accept bi-wire – USE IT.
5. The best speaker cables – do not have any; use amplified speakers (of course you can then have pre-amp issues).

Lektropacks huge range of Speaker Cables & Connectors can be found here.

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