Home-depo extention cord to rewire stero?

[Jean]

Insulation has nothing to do with it when you are dealing with high current setting like the amp to speaker wire, and not the low level stuff like the pre-amp to amp.

You won't notice a damn difference running a run of the mill speaker wire vs electrical cord/extension wire. Seriously. Use whatever you like / or is cheaper.

[stumble_t]

I've made some nice speaker wires out of cat5. it takes a while and in the end the Belden 5000up sounds just as good and its cheap. You want a multi-stranded cable (more the better) for the particular gauge you're using. The extension cord cable is cheap and nice however I think it makes the highs suffer a bit.

[bryant.cw]

http://www.inwallstore.com/product_p/14AWG4500.htm?gclid=CMaq5424i54CFSReagodsS4NtQ

Home Depot has some stuff like this, but not the same brand. Makes no difference really.

Extension cord cable is gonna be huge, ugly, stiff, and totally unnecessary. Ethernet cable is solid core not stranded and is a pain to work with, braiding takes forever etc. I had some in my home hi-fi for a couple years, but after that time the inflexibility of the braided cat5 rubbed through one of the jackets, shorted, and fried $400 of nice adcom gear. Never again.

14ga, 4 conductor stranded and jacketed in-wall cable is what you want. The jacket will protect from crimping and rubbing (to a point, no cable is impervious to total abuse), it slides and pulls easily through spaces unlike the sticky outer jacket on monstrous cable, it is clearly color coded, lets you run to 2 speakers with one cable, or twist them together to make a bigger gauge if thats your thing. Its plenty flexible and super easy to strip and work with. It doesn't look stupid. It works. Lastly, its cheap.

Home depot had some 14.4 for me the other day at 50¢ a foot.

[terible1biker57]

maybe i should have explained further on my previos post. i use cat5e which is made of 6 pairs of wires, combine the + and - of those 6 pairs gives a big enough gauge to carry power to an individual tweeter or lower power demanding woofer. by running a cable (6+ and 6- 24 ga. wires) to each speaker should give me a large enough gauge to carry the current needed.

search some on the internet and you will find that the sound quality from cat5, used as speaker wire, compares to some of the very high hi-fi speaker wires out there such as Kimber, Audio Quest, and XLO which are on a level above Monster Cable which i used to use. the individually insulated and spiral wound (of + and -) strands of wire keep out a lot of exernal "noise" that causes the distortion and static heard from speakers. inside a car with hundreds of wires and many electrical componets in such a small area, the way cat5 is made would help to block out much of these electronic noises emitted so you dont hear it in your music.

although im not saying that a car is the ideal place for hi-fi sound, the amount of clarity and detail that comes out of the treble and midrange using cat5 is quite considerable (atleast from my personal experiences with my hand-made home audio setup using Vifa drivers as well as others that have posted similar findings on the internet).

here is a close up pic of some cat5 speaker wire and a pic of one of my speaker towers when they were being tested and tweeked

I myself was very interested in this until I came upon this article.

http://www.installer.com/tech/cat5.html

[KangamangusDriver]

At the shop I use to work at we used 9wire, if you do the math there is wire for each speaker and one for the remote. Worked well, sounds very similiar to the extension cord.

[chriskb3]

maybe i should have explained further on my previos post. i use cat5e which is made of 6 pairs of wires, combine the + and - of those 6 pairs gives a big enough gauge to carry power to an individual tweeter or lower power demanding woofer. by running a cable (6+ and 6- 24 ga. wires) to each speaker should give me a large enough gauge to carry the current needed.

search some on the internet and you will find that the sound quality from cat5, used as speaker wire, compares to some of the very high hi-fi speaker wires out there such as Kimber, Audio Quest, and XLO which are on a level above Monster Cable which i used to use. the individually insulated and spiral wound (of + and -) strands of wire keep out a lot of exernal "noise" that causes the distortion and static heard from speakers. inside a car with hundreds of wires and many electrical componets in such a small area, the way cat5 is made would help to block out much of these electronic noises emitted so you dont hear it in your music.

although im not saying that a car is the ideal place for hi-fi sound, the amount of clarity and detail that comes out of the treble and midrange using cat5 is quite considerable (atleast from my personal experiences with my hand-made home audio setup using Vifa drivers as well as others that have posted similar findings on the internet).

here is a close up pic of some cat5 speaker wire and a pic of one of my speaker towers when they were being tested and tweeked

[Axxe]

The only thing I would use cat5 for is remote turn on and to strangle the idiot who uses it in the car.

[T.Dot E30]

lol cat5? is that a joke?

Maybe to power headphones or something.

[AndrewBird]

Why in the world would you run cat5 for speaker cable? It's way to small of gauge - like 24 guage. Speaker wire should be ATLEAST 14 guage IMO. Anything smaller and you get so much distortion and noise in the speakers.

AS far as the orange stuff goes, I've heard the same thing about a lot of guys using it. It is cheap, but like 808BMW said,
I would think it would be hard to hide. But if you aren't running rear speakers like most guys, it doesn't really matter.

[chriskb3]

I use cat5 for my home audio and am planning on rewiring my car speakers with it also, not for the sub though, that would take multiple cables (3+) to get enough current to flow through it. not exactly a cheap way to go, but, i have a big spool of it laying around anyways...

[BMW BMXER]

Ya speaker wire is pretty cheap at home depot at bulk. Just don't buy over priced car audio shit and you are good.

[808BMW]

Just use speaker wire. Extension cord really isn't cheaper, partexpress.com has huge rolls of speaker wire for cheap.

Extension cord is just too big to hide nicely, I used it before, ripped it out and ran regular 12gauge speaker wire.

[Spaz]

better insulation has a lot to do with it.

Basiclly thats one of the main reasons


The massive amount of insulation duces tit has rehe amount of electromagnetic interference you get from your ignition system/charging system :)

Due to extenison cord mainly been used for high draw applications in contruction etc. they are very thick gauges, and that in turn lowers the resistance in the line, and lower resistance the better. Explained from this qoute i took..

What happens when the resistance gets too high? First, there is power lost in the wire and the speaker will not play as loud. More important, as the resistance in series with the speaker increases, it makes the amplifier look more like a current source. This means the speaker frequency response will tend to follow the rise and fall of its impedance curve.

The impedance of most speaker systems is not constant with frequency. A speaker that is rated at 8 ohms may be exactly 8 ohms at only a few frequencies. The rest of the time it may wander above and below this value several times.

As the wire resistance increases, it becomes significant compared to the speaker impedance. It will affect the areas of lower impedance values first and eventually will be audible. Speakers with small impedance variations versus frequency, and that don't dip below the nominal impedance, will be more tolerant of higher resistance in the speaker wire. On the other hand, speakers with large variations in impedance that dip below the nominal value will be much easier to notice. If the speaker has constant impedance versus frequency, the only change will be reduced output.

[Jand3rson]

How is that any better than normal speaker wire? Is it just supposed to be cheaper? or is it because it has better insulation?

I don't know the specifics, but I know that the better insulation has a lot to do with it.

[erik325i]

I've heard from several people, and a couple of the car audio shops around here that have used and swear by extension cord speaker wiring.

How is that any better than normal speaker wire? Is it just supposed to be cheaper? or is it because it has better insulation?