Inexpensive speaker cables: any experience?

Canare 4S11, best budget speaker cable by far.

add some locking bananas and you are done

Post removed Feb 11, 2022

That was me, the advice was not good based upon the product after looking into it more.

I’ve spent a lot of time fooling with cables in addition to building high end speakers professionally. It seems silly to hook up $300-1k cables to a speaker that uses plain copper speaker wire internally.  The same thing applies to power cables. $1200 power cable that connects to a wall outlet that’s been wired with the cheapest copper the builder could buy. 

I use a quality oxygen free 10 gauge wire on my 4 ohm speakers, and 12 gauge on most everything else. Ray Kimber’s wire excels in long runs or in a noisy environment.  Most speaker wire runs are short distance. You don’t need a heavy gauge for that. Folks spend gobs of money on wire because it makes them happy knowing they have the “best”. 

I’ve experimented with speaker wire for years. I haven’t had the big money to purchase ultra-expensive wire, so I’ve used mostly inexpensive stuff from places like Best Buy, Radio Shack, etc. I’ve also used stranded speaker wire sold at Home Depot and Lowes, plus both stranded and solid core copper electrical wire sold at those places. Most of the time I’ve used 12 awg, but I’ve also used lower-gauged stranded and solid copper electrical wire to see how they sounded. I always heard that thicker gauge wire was the way to go. Most of the time I’ve been fairly satisfied.

Then I read this on the Morrow Audio web site that described their speaker wire technology:

"Morrow Audio signal cables use ONLY solid core OFC (oxygen free copper) wire, NEVER stranded. ...We eliminate all stranded wire distortion effects by using only solid core wire. You will hear much more information in your music that was lost from the smearing effect that stranded wire produces. Our cables contain multiple runs of wire. They are mono strands, individually insulated from each other. These multiple runs yield a profound and realistic presentation of the music. ...Morrow Audio signal cables ONLY use a small gauge wire. The different frequencies ride at the same plane in the wire, resulting in less phase and timing errors. A more accurate sound is the result. The soundstage is huge, instrument timber is accurate, it seems like the performers are in your room."

So I wondered if I could duplicate something like that without the big price tag.

Got on the Lowes web site, looked for the smallest gauge, solid copper wire possible, and found this: Southwire 1-ft 22/4 Solid White Security Cable https://www.lowes.com/pd/Southwire-1-ft-22-4-Solid-White-Security-Cable/4284059 (36 cents a foot). (The pictures are a little confusing, but it’s solid core, tiny 22 awg copper wire.) Not sure if the wire is oxygen-free copper. Definitely not multiple runs like Morrow Audio (other than 4 individually jacketed wires inside a polyvinyl chloride jacket), but I thought it was worth a try on my bi-wired Vandersteen 2CEs. So I bought a 10-foot length.

I didn’t want to spend too much additional money on this experiment, so I ended up buying cheap banana plugs at Lowes (8 pairs: one box of 10 plugs for $21.97, 3 additional pairs at $6.98 each).

I cut up two 4-foot lengths of the solid copper wire and put the plugs on. Once I hooked them up in my system, I was astonished. It was like night and day. Much more in the high end of the audio spectrum, so I could clearly hear ringing cymbals in Billy Cobham’s kit on his Spectrum Lp. Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis was awesome - more distinct instruments coming from different locations nearby and in the back of the soundstage.

Lots of spaciousness too, with full mids and lows. The 3D soundstage that I always look for was everywhere, from classical recordings by Karajan and Abbado to rock and electronic stuff like Los Lobos, Massive Attack and Kraftwerk. Natural reverb from concert halls (along with studio-applied reverb) seemed more alive to my ears. And I’ve discovered many more recordings that were mixed with "out-of-phase surround sound" that I didn’t notice before.

Since I put these speaker wires together I’ve added some Fo. Q 1mm damping tape to the speaker wires. Everything was massively improved once more in all the ways I’ve listed. Much more focused results in every aspect.

Once I hit the big time by winning the Lotto, my audio equipment budget will be close to unlimited. I have no doubt that a lot of the more expensive stuff I could buy will astonish me even more. Until then, I’m totally satisfied with my little experiment, done on the cheap with my fixed retirement income. This is the most enjoyment I’ve had from my stereo system in years.

I am waiting for audiophile voodoo atmosphere for Bluetooth.  "Evacuate the area between the device and the speaker, recharge with our special gas mixture.  We use only pure six-nines nitrogen and oxygen.  No carbon dioxide, no water or anything else that would ruin the musical experience.  There will be no stray magnetic fields or deleterious solar flare congruence to distort the purity of sound.  Highs will be higher, lows will be lower, there will be an increased sense of "air" no pun intended."  Expert customer testimonial from B.S. "The atmospheric change from Voodoo was incredible!  Delicious sweetening of the treble, dare I say tube-like elegance!  Bluetooth is only 16 bit resolution, but with Voodoo, I swear it was 18 bit!"