Fave speaker cables for JBL?

[SEAWOLF97]

Just good Belden or Carol 12-4 SOOW or SJOOW. .

That Carol is what I'm using on the under the floor runs on the 250ti's. They are 25 & 30 feet ... the wife grabbed a 100 ft. bundle in the thrift store and they wanted $2 for it, brand new.
I liked the extra thick jacket as the crawl space instillation was my goal. They sound great to me and have had compliments on the total sound, so would not hesitate to use it in the future.

[Flamingo]

Well I hope all of us rednecks and our extension cords haven't scared off the OP.

Still there Darren69?

[macaroonie]

I'm a fan of Van Damme tour grade OFC cables. No affiliation.

[brutal]

Sometimes that bulk can be advantageous. In my case, the 6Moons extension-cord fits these Neutrik dual-bananas perfectly:

I have a bunch of those on yardcord as well.

I did just order 100' of that monoprice 12-2 as I need some spare cable and the free shipping for the $4 XLR cables I had in my cart was a bonus.

[RMC]

Hi Flamingo,

RE Post # 10

I've abstained from posting more here on the twisted pair cable issue since I don't want to steal the OP's thread, plus I agree with you mentioning "Well I hope all of us rednecks and our extension cords haven't scared off the OP. Still there Darren69? "

But I'm posting in my own BGW Amp thread, to avoid any issues, a reply to yours (see you there). Regards,

Richard

[sguttag]

Twisted cable absolutely has significantly higher noise immunity than parallel or worse, non-bonded cable (e.g. plain THHN wire in a conduit). It is so easy to experiment and prove it to oneself. Not only will the twist keep outside "noise" out (RF, nearby AC lines...etc.) it will also keep its neighbor out (e.g. Left impressing its signal onto Right). The longer the parallel run the more induction a straight cable will pick up.

I've worked in the cinema industry my whole career (40 years now). It was (and I'm sure is) common to use simple THHN wires in the conduit to get audio from the booth to the screen speakers. That was fine in the days of mono. But once stereo came in (where we have three speakers behind the screen), using just THHN, you WILL get crosstalk between channels if you use just straight THHN. To make matters worse, when some theatres were "twinned" in the '70s, they kept the original conduit runs and put both theatres speaker wires in the same pipe and merely "T" to each screen at the screen end (the booth was the same). Now you get crosstalk between theatres!

I've had surround speakers pick up CB radios if the array was on an outside wall.

So, if you want noise immunity, twisted speaker wire is your friend. With a twist, any inductive noise will most likely go across both conductors which will give you a high common-mode-rejection-ratio (CMRR). If you want to really step it up, you can go for a 4-conductor, twisted cable and wire opposite conductors in a "star-quad" configuration. I've never done it for speakers but some have but have done it on very low-level stuff like for the lines from magnetic playback heads to their preamps.

The outer jacket does NOT keep the twists together. You can even buy non-jacketed twisted pair, believe it or not.

http://store.nexternal.com/westpenn/nj210-p3801.aspx

Any good twisted wire will have a uniform twist rate (twists per inch in USA speak) and the wire manufacturer should list it.

One can certainly make their own twisted cable out of individual conductors (again something like THHN stranded) but DON'T USE A DRILL. Yeah, it is the easy way but part of what you are doing then is increasing the twisting of the individual conductor too. You want to keep the individual conductors in their original twist and merely interlock the conductors about each other. It is tough to describe in textual form but picture drawing a line on each conductor with a sharpie before you start. When you are done, that line should still be a line on each conductor facing the same direction...if that line starts to twist, then you've added twist to the conductor, which is wrong and potentially harmful.

A proper twisted cable has a "lay" and when done properly, it does not want to coil up like a spring (which always happens when people use drills).

High strand count mostly helps with flexibility and connections. The higher the strand count, the more flexible the cable will likely be (the outer jacket plays a roll in this too). It also helps with the connection. If you have a solid conductor and go to insert that into a typical speaker terminal, you really just have two contact points. As the strand count goes up, the wire can "mush" (it's a technical term ;-)) out and provide more contact area over the entire terminal (including crimps, banana plugs...etc.) so there is value there. Don't worry about the "skin effect" as we are talking about audio frequencies here.

Do what you want but there are some physical facts when it comes to speaker cabling that no manufacturer can hand-wave and get around and some of these are easy enough to experiment with to prove to oneself.

[SEAWOLF97]

Thread: Exposing the Speaker Wire myth

http://www.audioheritage.org/vbullet...aker-Wire-myth