10 gauge Sound King or the 12 gauge Carol Command wire?
 

Hi,
I need to buy a long run of cable (100') for my rear speakers (JBL S38's). My receiver is the Onkyo Integra 6.2

I'm looking at the following choices:
10 gauge Sound King or the 12 gauge Carol Command wire. Both runs cost around $70 from Parts Express. I'd like to have something a little better, but can't seem to find it.

The Carol Command is silver coated.

I'd be willing to spend $125+ but can't find anything in that price range. Suggestions?

--Thanks for the help--

Ive heard good things about www.bettercables.com and Audio Quest. I have Monster XP and it's decent cable, although overpriced at $1.50 a foot.

Do you need 10 or 12 gauge for your rears? If they are smaller speakers you could get away with 14 or 16. They are JBL's so I would not think they would be sensative to speaker cable.

Better Cables
 

Yes, I have 3 cables ordered from Better Cables for the fronts and center but don't need that high of quality for the rears. The budget is $125 and it will take atleast 75 total feet to wire both rear speakers.

Speaker size has nothing to do with what gauge wire you use for your surrounds. If you are indeed running 75 ft of wire to <b>any</b> speaker, 12 gauge would be the <i>minimum</i> I recommend, and would push for the 10 for that long of a run. I picked up several spools of 10 gauge original Monster at Worst Buy a while back when I was wiring my HT, and they were approx. $65 a spool.

Uh oh, I think I should have tried harder to make my question more clear.

I'll need approximately 40+/- feet of cable for the left rear speaker and 40+/- for the right rear speaker. I'm trying to find a way to buy wire on a $.75 - $1.25/ft budget and get something a little better than the very cheapest available.

So far I have found Sound King 10 gauge, Carol Command 12 gauge silver coated, and Acoustic Research wire that fits into this budget and I was hoping to get some opinions on these and maybe some suggestions of other brands of wire in that price range. If anyone uses these, I'd love to hear what you think.

Hopefully I can come up with a solution soon since the speakers are arriving on friday.

p.s. I'll let you know if my poor JBL's are sensitive to speaker cable. ;)

$1.50 a foot? Ouch. Hope you didn't pay that, as a 100' foot spool of Monster XP only sells for 59.99.

No offense, I didnt mean to knock you JBL's - Hell, I dont even have a set of rears. I was just saying that unless you have a very expensive set of speakers, the cable wont make much of a difference, if any.

Maybe it wasnt XP, Im not sure. I bought it from a spool at my local A/V store. I believe it's around 10 or 12 gague - it's decent wire and I only needed 25 ft.

As for wiring, if you use 75ft of 10 gague wire, wont the resistance be too much? I would think using a higher gague would be less resistance.

The smaller the gauge the thicker the wire. The thicker the wire the less the resistance. Go back to the classical water analogy for electronics. For equal lengths, electrons will flow flow easier through a fat tube than a skinny tube.

I still dont follow. The thicker the wire, the more matter there is. The more matter, the more electrons are lost in this matter, correct?

I dont remember much of the physics electricity class I took, but I seem to remeber, the longer or thicker the wire, the more resistance and the less electrons get through. However, I could be mistaken and am curious as to what is correct.

Nope, partially right though.. longer the wire, the more the resistance, thicker the wire, less resistance. just think of it as water in a pipe. Electrons don't get lost.

mathematically R=Rs(l/a) where Rs is a resistivity constant, l is the length, and A is the cross sectionally width.