How to Choose the Best Speaker Cables: Gauge, Resistance and More

hello my friends I'm Jean de la sala I'm president of Audio holics and today we have Hugo Rivera vice-president of marketing Jean how are you doing today I'm feeling pretty pumped man we're doing some great topics video coverage today and we're gonna do a very important one that people have been asking us about yeah let's talk about cables what's the best cable to use you know well you know people always ask me what speaker cable should I use what matters and speaker cables and of course there's a lot of myths and a lot of snake oils out there that we love to of course debunk yeah absolutely so today I want to focus on the most important metric and speaker cables and that is resistance when the Borg say resistance is futile they really mean it yep absolutely lift it up because you're dealing when you're dealing with connecting a speaker to an amplifier speaker is a low impedance okay and then amplifier has a very low output impedance right so the most dominant metric you're dealing with is resistance I mean the inductance and capacitance all that stuff matters to to some extent but the bottom line is resistance okay okay so let's talk a little bit about cable gauge yes okay cable gauge is basically measurement of the cross sectional area of a conductor and the odd thing about cable gauge is the lower the gauge to thicker the cable mm-hmm okay so anytime you go from one gauge of cable let's say you go from 13 gauge cable or 14 gauge cable down to 10 or 11 gauge every time you drop three gauge you have the resistance right so I just remember that because that's an important fact now you get some of these esoteric companies that say all solid core conductors are better because they lack strand jumping which of course strand dropping doesn't exist you know we've talked about that there's no such thing as dialed rectification in a wire it can't produce harmonic distortion we have articles measurements everything on that that's covered but let's talk about solid korver stranded in actuality if you look at our article we did on skin effect and we'll talk about skin effect in a while solid core conductors are actually less ideal than stranded solid core first of all is less flexible so it's harder to work with yeah solid core actually exhibits more skin effect tendency than stranded because even though stranded cable it's not a true lit cable where each strand is separated by an insulator it does exhibit lits like behavior and while we've calculated the skin effect rise at twenty killers to go up twenty percent on a solid core cable it actually only goes up about three or four percent on a stranded cable of the same gauge right and that's in our article you can see our measurements on that so it's pretty incredible because in actuality you want a stick with stranded cable if you can because people that are worried about skin effect they're mostly buying these solid core cables they can be doing themselves more of a disservice than they're doing a benefit and you know gene before we continue for the neophytes out there could you please define what skin effect is a skin effect is basically it's a measurement of how the AC resistance changes of a cable versus frequency because as the frequency goes up the current flows more on the surface of the conductor and a lot of people won't even tell you this the internal inductance actually drops and you can see this when you measure the series of inductance of a cable so in some in some aspects that's a little bit of a benefit of it but here's the thing we've measured cables that have had less skin effect okay mmhmm like these high-end esoteric cables yeah and they do show you a flatter inductance profile up to 100 kilohertz but the problem is their basic DC resistance is much higher than standard 12kg zip zip cord like we have here so in actuality you have more impedance loss more insertion loss from the skin effect free cable than you do from the basic Home Depot cable it has low resistance to begin with so we should probably talk about insertion loss yeah exactly insertion loss is basically a measurement of how much power loss you're going to get as a result of resistance again you know you take a voltage divider if you have an 8 ohm speaker and you have a 1 ohm resistance in the cable you're going to lose a good percentage of your power based on the 1 ohm resistance in the cable and I have this in our article you can check out so you know it's important to maintain low insertion loss and use resistance cables right right that what you know watching one question that some people may are asking you know it's about for example monster cables they go ahead and produce these cables with these gold-plated connectors right yeah yeah they claim this is incredible you know this is gonna help your system tremendously what is your take on this you know I went to a monster demo at CES many years ago and I always go to the demos because I like to see what kind of trickery that they think okay it really is trickery because to the average consumer you look at these demos they have to have their light bulb demo I will show you the Mazda brand cable here and Brand X over here you press the button the button for the Brand X and they and the bulb is like you know half as bright as the monster cable one oh my god does a difference the bug is brighter well monster cable mmm-hmm well you know I got a peek behind there behind there there little magic I set up behind their curtain it's like The Wizard of Oz curtain I got a peek behind the curtain and their cable was 12 gauge cable Brand X was 18 gauge cable hopes so of course Brand X has more resistance hence more insertion loss hence more power loss why the the monster kpop form better now had they done a equivalent comparison of Brand X being the same gauge as theirs the light bulb would have been the same brightness assuming both cables have the same length of conductors Wow so okay take that with a grain of salt my friends that's a huge eye-opener right there again AC resistance I mean cable resistance is the dominant metric there you know I don't know if you want to talk about different quality conductors and materials and well you know what if if I'm somebody else buying some cables what will you recommend me to get you know again look at our tables what I did was I came up with a chart based on cable gauge and I calculated insertion loss for 8 ohm loads and for own loads and you can look at it so if you're running I don't remember exactly all the specifications but what I did was I assumed that if you want the most utmost fidelity you want less than tens of Adibi loss of 20 kilohertz most people can't hear that most people the sensitivity is really in the mid range you could hear maybe 2/10 of a DB loss at 2 kilohertz but not necessarily most people can't even hear 20 kilohertz so this is a very conservative table and you know if you look at the table it'll tell you to use this gauge of cable based on your speaker impedance based on the length now you're using okay so the other thing too is I also calculate a damping factor which is a which is a ratio of the impedance the output impedance to the source impedance and you really want a damping factor damping factor gets blown out of the water just like contrast ratios do on TVs but incidentally if you work out the insertion loss to be less than two-tenths of a DB the damping factor has to be greater than 50 and that's a usually good guideline you don't want to go with a damping factor much lower than you know really 20 or 30 but 50 is a good guideline when you're dealing with speaker connected to the amp so look at our chart you could put that up on the video but you know cable is so cheap these days I would never recommend if you're really doing high fidelity I would use at least 12 gauge you know I wouldn't go to like a teenage I mean we have this is like 16 gauge conductor here thin junky stuff I mean it serves its purpose for short distances this is 12 gauge okay I use 10 gauge which is lower resistance has like three milliamps per foot of loop resistance which is really low okay my favorite cable to be honest with you is 14 4 because it's 4 conductor 14 gauge when you parallel them up it gives you an equivalent gauge of 11 which is close to the resistance of a 10 gauge cable and you've got a redundant pair of connectors in case one of them break nice so we always recommend 14 4 if you can it's a little bit harder to work with and terminate but you know if this is high fidelity go with the 14 4 if it's for your surrounds you definitely want to go with if you can with the lower gauge because you've got longer runs of cable exactly you know I run cable I have a separate surround system in a different bedroom and the cable runs are 60 feet and I ran 10 gauge through the wall right right so you cut your resistance down exactly and you know dick - if you have a forum speaker now you need a cable that's half the resistance mm-hmm as opposed to an 8 ohm speaker right really again folks at the end of the day you know it's nice to have low inductance it's nice to have pretty cables to look at the resistance if if you're not getting at least the resistance of a 12 or 10 gauge cable don't waste your money on these exotic cables a lot of these exotic cables promise you the moon and they give you cheese but that's the bottom line my friend yeah yeah definitely and definitely run away if the companies you know saying that they have to cryogenically freeze or put a battery on the cable or battery we've covered that topic today elevate your cables it's like they put them on elevators yeah or any other sort of religious ceremony I said yeah you know we're not we're not a faith-based organization here with these on science and you know we don't pray to our cables you shouldn't pray to your cables either you know what you do in your home in your privacy is your business but in reality let's deal with some science here because it's a piece of wire yeah okay there's not a lot of mystery there it's not rocket science no I mean the pieces of wire this is just based on proven science that has been tested over years and years first since Faraday's may come up guys I mean everywhere else in every industry it's an established science there's no if ands or buts or you know no BS but it's only in consumer audio where they come up with these wild theories yes Oh Tarek sign to try to sell you something that you know to differentiate themselves right absolutely so go with the low gage low resistance cables as low as you can handle as low as you can terminate and as low as you can fit and if you're doing it in drywall behind drywall you see l2 cable cl2 approved fire retardant yes of course awesome great amazing with that said I think I'll just invite aware people to go ahead and subscribe to the channel comment below let us know what you think what kind of cables you're using and certainly feel free to share this video with your friends yeah what K what cable gauge are you using let us know yeah that's good question awesome well with that said until next time keep listening that's great nice promise you the boat and give you cheese I don't know you would come out with that I have no idea I surprised myself

Channel: Audioholics

Views: 259,247

Keywords: audioholics, video review, how to choose the best speaker cables, Speaker Wire, Loudspeaker (Competitive Space), Electrical Resistance And Conductance (Dimension), choosing the best speaker cables, gauges, resistance, insertion loss, damping factor, skin effect, wire speaker gauge

Id: r7DdcZCbABo

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 27 2015