DIY Speaker wire

I have tried military wire and it is awesome. I do own expensive specialty cables and the mil-spec wire is every bit as good for very little money. This is however, not just any military wire, but silver plated, twisted pair, braid shielded with the braid silver plated, and teflon wrapped. Lots of military wire is also tin coated and you don't want that. You need to examine the wire code: First look for ML27500 type wire. Second look at the next code lets take A16SB4S22 as an example: ignore the first letter, the next number (16) is the gauge of the wire- look for the lowest number you can find- 22, 18, 16, 12, 10, 8. next, you will see a one or two letter code- (SB) you can ignore this, next you will see a number (4)- this is the number of conductors- look for 2, 4 or 8, multiple conductors are better is better, next is the shielding type (S) S stands for silver, T or V for tin (Booo) look for an S, W, G, $ or K- all are types of silver shielding. The last two letters are the type of jacket. 06, 16, 26 are good. Confused yet? Ok- get double the amount you need, cut in half to make two cables. If you get 4 conductor, twist two conductors together to make your + and two for your - channel. (pair up the same two color stripes on each end- careful!) Do not use connectors, just put the wire directly onto the speakers and amp. Sit back in awe of the upgrade that cost you $30 of mil-spec wire on ebay.

Geez u guyz with all your dirty, dirty wires...just filth I say, utter filth!

"08-27-12: Kijanki
Gauge 10 has resistance of 0.001ohm per foot making 10' typical cable (both ways) 20x0.001= 0.020ohm while at the same time inductor in series with the woofer is likely to have 0.1ohm "

- and what is the output imedanse of Your poweramp? Even high-ohm tube-amps performs way more dynamic & relaxed if they get some good thick solidcore. As thgick as the copper used to Connect the powercaps in Your amp, look and think..

Dynamic loss in speakercables+passive filters are the biggest loss in a hifi-system. No.2 is the loss through multicore powercables, or should I say slowstart-circuits?

Unfairlane, Tube amps present higher output impedance being power source vs voltage source that SS amps are. I was just trying to show that cable thickness is pretty much irrelevant because woofer choke has 5x higher resistance (not to mention impedance of the speaker itself that is mostly resistive). As for thick wires going to power supply caps - it is because current is charge is delivered to capacitors in very short current spikes of very high amplitude. This amplitude is much higher than any output current you'll ever see.

There might be another reason for using thick cables and it is inductance. Inductance of typical gauge 18 wire is in order of 350nH per foot while it is less than 300nH for gauge 10. It represents about 0.9 ohm of inductive reactance at 20kHz for 10' cable.