On Wed, 18 May 2005 19:22:23 -0400, Tony Meloche
wrote:




I have always used 14 gauge speaker wire, but if it disappeared from
the face of the earth tomorrow, I would shrug and use 16 gauge wire
without a care in the world. 18 gauge wire I consider acceptable if the
run isn't too long, but I, personally, would never use anything thinner
than that from a 100W amp to my speakers of (nominal) 6 ohm impedance.
And 50 feet of 18 gauge zip at my local hardware store is about $6.50
50 feet of 14 gauge speaker cable I can get for $15. For a one time
$8.50 price difference, I think the 14 gauge is well worth it. 12 gauge
wire, though, is a waste of money, IMO.

Tony

I use powered subwoofers (a form of biamplification) so I don't have
to worry about high power on my 16g speaker wires. That being said,
the Rane Pro Audio Reference spake thusly:

''damping factor: Damping is a measure of a power amplifier's ability
to control the back-emf motion of the loudspeaker cone after the
signal disappears. The damping factor of a system is the ratio of the
loudspeaker's nominal impedance to the total impedance driving it.
Perhaps an example best illustrates this principle: let's say you have
a speaker cabinet nominally rated at 8-ohms, and you are driving it
with a Rane MA 6S power amp through 50 feet of 12 gauge cable.
Checking the MA 6S data sheet (obtained off this web site, of course),
you don't find its output impedance, but you do find that its damping
factor is 300. What this means is that the ratio of a nominal 8 ohm
loudspeaker to the MA 6S's output impedance is 300. Doing the math [8
divided by 300] comes up with an amazing .027 ohms. Pretty low.
Looking up 12 gauge wire in your handy Belden Cable Catalog (... then
get one.) tells you it has .001588 ohms per foot, which sure ain't
much, but then again you've got 100 feet of it (that's right: 50 feet
out and 50 feet back -- don't be tricked), so that's 0.159 ohms, which
is six times as much impedance as your amplifier. (Now there's a
lesson in itself -- use big cable.) Adding these together gives a
total driving impedance of 0.186 ohms -- still pretty low -- yielding
a very good damping factor of 43 (anything over 10 is enough, so you
don't have to get extreme about wire size). [Note that the word is
damp-ing, not damp-ning as is so often heard -- correct your friends;
make enemies.] ''

http://www.rane.com/digi-dic.html