Suggest speaker cable for long run...?

I second Al's advice and would add that you should avoid 4 ohm speakers if you desire good quality sound and furthermore (if you are serious) simply use a pro type balanced XLR preamp and run your 50 feet with XLR to your power amp close to the speakers. (XLR balanced use not only higher signal levels but are also properly shielded and much more immune to noise)

This would get you past concerns with speaker cables and low impedances dips in your speakers.

If this long run is for surround speakers in an HT system in a large room then I would not be overly concerned - just get some decent thick speaker wires. I would only be concerned if this was for a primary setup for critical listening.

Thanks for the responses.

It's for both HT and critical listening. I can't fit the amps up front (and if I could I wouldn't want to because my Pass amps glow bright blue...).

Unfortunately my speakers are 4ohms (Wilson Sophias). What I seem to notice with long runs is a degredation of upper bass (everything else seems fine).

What is OCOS cable?

See here:

http://dedicatedaudio.com/inc/sdetail/20951

I've just made a set of the WLM DIY cables and will be trying those along with some other cables I'm making out of a 30' spool of Belkin PureAV Silver Series cable that uses solid core PCOCC copper. The spool cost me $15. You can search for it on the Internet.

In addition I'll be trying out the Morrow Audio SP3 and the OCOS cables. Somewhere in this batch I should find a winner.

I took a look at the OCOS description. While I have no reason to question its being an excellent choice for longer runs (and at $1K for 7.5 meters it had better be!), I find the design rationale offered there to be, um, unpersuasive and incomplete.

There is no indication of inductance, capacitance, or resistance. The terms "characteristic impedance" and "impedance" are used interchangeably, when in fact they are very different. "Characteristic impedance" is a transmission line concept, which only comes into play when cable length is a significant fraction of a wavelength. That is not even remotely the case at bass frequencies for a 50 foot cable. Which makes the graph included in their literature meaningless.

The "impedance," on the other hand, that would result from the inductance of a 100 foot round-trip run of speaker cable certainly can be expected to be significant in relation to the nominally 4 ohm speaker impedance (which is undoubtedly even lower at some frequencies). But the OCOS' inductance is not specified.

Again, while these cables may very well be excellent choices for longer runs, aside perhaps from their cost, their technical rationale is unpersuasive, and the technical information provided is not complete enough to allow a meaningful prediction of the compromises that a 50 foot run will result in, compared to a shorter run.

Regards,
-- Al

I tried a bunch of stuff (borrowed from dealers) and ended up using Canare 4S11. Some cables beat it at shorter lengths, but nothing did at 30ft. I run it single wired instead of bi-wired. I have approx 30 ft runs that I can't do anything about until I buy my own home.

At $1.35/ft from Blue Jeans Cable, its not a huge investment if its not what you're looking for.