Thoughts on very cheap speaker cables

I am not an engineer and have no desire to enter the speaker cable business. My reason is to try to improve the sound of my system with much smaller diameter cables without spending $$$$ for cables. The cables currently in use are XLO reference series type 0.6. The cables I describe will be much smaller, less visible and probably be under $50. The time to make them does not concern me since I am retired and like to tinker. I was hoping to get some responses about the negative or positive aspects of using only 2 22 awg solid wires per channel. That means 4 12ft wires for connecting two stereo speakers.

Not spending a lot of $$$$? What would you expect to spend on your planned cables? Not to mention the time involved.
I think you could find a pair of used cables, maybe with a similar configuration, for less.

I was hoping to get some responses about the negative or positive aspects of using only 2 22 awg solid wires per channel.

The gauge is inadequate for neutral behavior. AWG 22 wire has a resistance of about 16 ohms per thousand feet. The 24 foot round-trip that the signal has to make, to and from each speaker, corresponds to a resistance of about 0.4 ohms.

That would reduce your damping factor to 8/0.4 = 20, assuming that the damping factor of the amp is high enough to be insignificant in relation to that.

I believe that the impedance of your speakers is nominally 8 ohms but dips to around 4 ohms at some frequencies, especially in the bass region. At those frequencies the effective damping factor would be only 10. Also, the interaction of the 0.4 ohm cable resistance and the variation of speaker impedance as a function of frequency would result in approximately a 0.5 db frequency response irregularity, small but not necessarily insignificant. Finally, depending on the frequency content of the music, between about 10% and 20% of the power delivered by the amplifier at any given time would be wasted, and dissipated in the cables as heat.

See this wire gauge table for further information on resistance as a function of gauge. For neutral behavior, cable resistance should be kept to an extremely small fraction of the lowest value reached by the impedance of the speaker at any audible frequency.

Although whether or not neutral behavior is the goal, for a given system and listener, is of course another matter altogether.

Regards,
-- Al

I have 500 feet of the wire so i was also thinking of twisting 2 wires for the + and 2 wires for the - for each speaker. This would result in 8 12 ft lengths of 22 awg. I think the result of twisting two 22 awg wires would = about 18 awg. Does that make sense?

Connecting two of the conductors in parallel would of course reduce the resistance by a factor of 2. As you can see in the wire gauge table, a factor of 2 change in resistance corresponds to an increment of 3 gauge sizes. So you would have the equivalent of 19 gauge.

I can't say, of course, whether or not that would be satisfactory in your system from a subjective standpoint, but from a technical standpoint it strikes me as being marginal at best.

Regards,
-- Al