Least Losses: Long speaker cable vs. Long Interconnect?

You may or may not experience hum & noise pickup problems from running a long unbalanced interconnect. I've read of others doing so with no problems at all; it depends upon the impedances at source & load in addition to the particular cable in use. The only way to know for sure is to try it. You may be able to borrow some long interconnects (& speaker cables) of your preference from Cable Company (www.fatwyre.com). For this testing, they need not be exactly the length you need permenently (just move some things around if necessary). Incidentally, Cable Co's nominal cable rental fees are applicable to any future purchases of anything that they sell. Theoretically you're better off with shorter speaker cables & longer interconnects, although as always YMMV. I've always been forced to use longer speaker cables due to room-architecture; frankly I don't worry about it & these speaker runs are even a bit longer than yours are. I much prefer a networked speaker cable design for my longer runs, MIT T2, T3 or T4 would be good for your theater application. At that 4 to 5 meter length I wouldn't expect a great deal of difference one way or the other though. You'd have to try it out yourself to find out, but remember that these are only the surrounds anyway so not worth significant expenditure IMO. In any case be sure to use a decent quality cable; if you have only zip cord etc. then definitely do something about that right away.

As this is just the rear channels I was thinking of using some Audioquest Diamondback or Coral. I'm not too familiar with the MIT line, but I will research them. I don't want to go overboard on cable, but considering that I will be plugging into a Bryston 4B-ST and powering some N805s for the rears I want to make sure I don't choke the signal too much. Thanks for the input.

Based on recent experience I'm convinced that something almost no one seems to address, except perhaps indirectly through mention of specific cable types, is the question of wire gauge. For a more detailed description of my experience, you can check my response in this section under "any experience using better cables?", but essentially I have had very favorable results in a bi-wire configuration using 30' runs of 10 gauge appliance wire purchased at Home Depot for 14 cents/ft., total cost less than $17. On the other hand, as I indicated in that other message, I am convinced that interconnects generally play a much larger role in these matters than does speaker cable. But-and this is perhaps a big BUT-all such discussions must be seen in the overall context of interactions among the various items in the system.

In contrast to much of what appears above, I would like to point out a few things:
1: Music is an AC waveform and is mostly made up of voltage (read amplitude) varriations for volume, and frequency varriations for the obvious.
2: interconnects carry the low voltage ( 0.25mV ~ 2.5V nominal) stuff between components.
3: Speaker cables carry the high voltage (2.0 ~ 40+? how loud do you go @ what power?) stuff.
If you loose X% per meter, the losses will be more noticable in the interconnect than in the speaker wire.
I have yet to see speaker wire act as an antenna, and I live under one of the largest broadcasting towers in the West - Twin Peaks!. [ I did have some problems in my phono section, but some better wire inside the pre-amp and some ferrite made it go away.]
Happy listening

I have tried this kind of comparison with two very good cable types, NBS Monitor 0 and Cardas Golden Reference, and both times I found that there was a noticeable improvement when I used shorter speaker cables and a longer preamp-power amp interconnect instead of a shorter interconnect and longer speaker cables. (The range of lengths ran 1 vs 3 meters on the interconnects, and 4 vs. 10 feet on the speaker cables.) This remained true when I switched preamps, power amps and speakers.