Speaker Wire

Speaker wire is used to make the electrical connection between loudspeakers and audio amplifiers. Modern speaker wire consists of two electrical conductors individually insulated by plastic. more...

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The two wires are electrically identical, but are marked (eg a ridge on the insulation of one wire, color of one wire, a thread in one wire, etc) to allow convenient polarization connection. Certain older designs also featured another pair of wires for electrical power for an electromagnet in the loudspeaker. At least one such speaker design is still in production (in France), but essentially all drivers now made use permanent magnets became economical to produce and use.

The effect of speaker wire upon the signal it carries is a much debated topic in the audiophile and high fidelity worlds. The accuracy of much advertising claims on these points is also a matter of much debate.

Explanation

Speaker wire, like any other electrical component, has three parameters which determine its performance: resistance, capacitance, and inductance. If a perfect wire were possible it would have no resistance, no capacitance, and no inductance. The shorter a wire is, the closer it comes to being perfect as resistance increases with length in all conductors. Resistance has by far the largest effect on speaker wire performance. Capacitative and inductive characteristics of speaker wire are vanishingly small relative to the loudspeaker itself and are effectively independent of the frequency of a signal being passed through the wire, at least for audio frequencies.

The quality of construction is often chosen for aesthetic purposes and convenience. Stranded wire is more flexible than solid wire and hence easier to work with. For a wire that will be exposed, often in a home, (rather than run within walls, under floor coverings, or behind molding), appearance may be a benefit, a wholly subjective one, but is irrelevant for electrical characteristics. Better purification of oxidizing materials such as copper will result in more consistent conductive properties throughout the length of the wire. Better jacketing may be thicker or tougher, less likely to tangle and easier to pull through a group of other wires, or incorporate a number of shielding techniques.

Even with a poor wire, an audible degradation of sound may not exist. Many supposedly audible differences in speaker wire can be attributed to listener bias or the placebo effect. Listener bias is helped in no small part by the large number of wire manufacturers making claims about their products with little or no engineering or scientific basis. Many manufacturers catering to audiophiles (as well as those available in less expensive retail locations) make poetic, if unmeasurable, claims about this wire sounding open, dynamic, or smooth. To justify the claims, many rely on little understood electrical properties such as skin effect, characteristic impedance of the cable, or resonance. None have any measurable effect at audio frequencies, though each matters at radio frequencies) .

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