In the past, there was no special speaker wire. It was all mains wire, because all was 100% copper. Today, finding 100% copper cable having the cross-section stamped on it is pretty rare. Electronics being more efficient hence drawing less power allows manufacturers to run 3-4 copper clad aluminum strands as mains cable in some cases.

Today, I'd still use "mains wire" if I can find it in a 100% copper form with the correct cross section. The reason I used "speaker wire" in my set is because the recommended cable was thicker than the standard stuff, and I didn't believe that I'd be able to get 100% copper wire easily.

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amluto 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Where do you live? In the US, there a lot of widely available brands of UL-listed (or equivalent) wire with clearly marked specs and the cross section in ridiculous units of AWG. If it says it’s copper and it’s not an outrageous counterfeit, it’s copper. (And it will have a resistance that is in spec, because this is important for code-compliant electrical installations, and it won’t corrode when terminated properly.)

And the UL-listed stuff is fantastic, because UL cares about the insulation and jacket. There is plenty of “speaker” wire with crappy insulation that degrades after a few years, but I’ve never seen an actual CL2 or CM or CL3 (or their R or P variants) or THWN(2), TC(-ER) etc, cable, from the last 30 years, with any such issues.

16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire, and it’s cheap and you can buy it at any store that sells electrical supplies. TC-ER is great if you need something bigger than 16AWG (the longer the run, the thicker the cable you need to keep resistance below 1 ohm or so), but it’s a bit harder to find.

The thing that can be genuinely hard to find is nice twisted-pair or shielded twisted-pair cable in any format other than category (Ethernet) cable, and that tends to max out at 22-23AWG and may have the wrong number of conductors for whatever you’re doing with it. For making up an RCA cable, this is completely unnecessary — use RG59 or RG6 cable if you need particularly good shielding. But for long runs of balanced audio cable, you want actual twisted pairs, 23 AWG is plenty, but you may need those pairs shielded from each other to minimize crosstalk. So you end up with commercial snake cables, and those are not cheap. Some people use digital stage boxes these days, because an effectively transparent ADC and all the electronics needed to make it work can be cheaper than the fancy cables.

	▲	bayindirh 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Where do you live? Somewhere far w.r.t. US. :) > 16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire, Yet, it's way thinner than the manufacturer of my speakers recommend, which start at 13, and only go up. In my case I need 12 or 11. I don't remember honestly. The good thing is, I managed to get a roll of the correct cable made by Acoustic Research. While the cable is not "fancy", it's copper, has the correct thickness and it's jacket still feels like day 1, and that thing is 10+ years old at this point. For RCA cables I still use the factory default set came with my amplifier. Japan made, with very flexible jackets and gold plated connectors. That provides more than enough clarity for me.

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yial 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wouldn’t SOOW (or THHN/THWN-2 )in 14 or 16 gauge be appropriate for this?

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bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent [-]

My speaker's manual says the following:

> Please always use a good quality loudspeaker connection cable from an audio dealer. To prevent impairment of sound quality, we recommend cables with cross-sections of at least 2.5 mm² for lengths up to 3 m and at least 4 mm² for lengths above 3 m.

Interestingly, the table present in the printed manual is not present in the one on the internet. IIRC, recommendation for 100W up to 3m was 3mm² or 4mm² at minimum.

From what I looked at, 14AWG is ~2mm² and 16AWG is 1.3mm². Way too skinny for what the manufacturer says.

Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience. The cable I use is at [0]. I have a roll like this. Mine is thicker than 2.5mm² though.

[0]: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Jr0vhSTsL._AC_UF1000,1...

	▲	amluto 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> To prevent impairment of sound quality, we recommend cables with cross-sections of at least 2.5 mm² for lengths up to 3 m and at least 4 mm² for lengths above 3 m. This is just a unit issue. See: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wire-gauges-d_419.html Those numbers are also ridiculous. They’re recommending 13AWG or higher for a 3m run. That’s about 20 feet round trip, which is about 0.04 ohms. The speaker should be 8 ohms nominal, but let’s call it 1 ohm at some very audible frequency to be conservative. So you might lose 2% of your power or maybe 0.1dB. Keep in mind that you cannot hear frequency-independent attention at all (the volume knob fixes it), so you’ll only hear the frequency-dependent part, which will be smaller, and your speaker plus room already has frequency dependence far in excess of 0.1dB. Note that the speaker power doesn’t even factor in to the calculation — as you supply more power, you’re increasing the current and voltage accordingly, and the effects cancel out. At very high power you may care about heating. That recommended cable has an NEC ampacity of 15A or more, and 15A^2 * 8ohms = 1800W. Derate a bit because you’re at higher frequencies than 60Hz and you are just fine — in fact, the voltage will become a safety problem at silly power long before the resistive heating matters. I will admit that there is a good reason to use at least 18AWG cable or so: speaker cable terminations are utter crap, and the crappiness seems to get worse as the fanciness goes up. A thicker wire is more likely to survive being terminated, within limits. Buy some 16AWG two-conductor CL2 or CL2R or CL2P cable at your home improvement store and be done with it. > Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience. I have never heard mains hum coupled from a passive speaker cable. That’s not really a thing — there just isn’t enough power to make it audible under normal conditions.

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stonogo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does aluminum not conduct electricity?

	▲	atoav 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, and it is also useed for certain applications, if you don't care for the need of thicker wires to get the same resistance.
	▲	bayindirh 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes. Around 60% of copper. You need much thicker cables to carry the same power.