Speaker Wire 2.0 on Pro Acoustics Tech Talk Episode 15

On this week’s episode of Pro Acoustics Tech Talk, Nathan and Coltin are going in-depth on speaker wire, audio wattage, and audio signal.

Hey everybody, we are back with another Pro Acoustics Tech Talk. I'm Nathan, I'm Coltin and we are back talking about wire again. This is Wiring 2.0, and we're going to tell you a little bit more about audio wattage and how audio signal might be a little bit different, some little bit more in-depth stuff about wire, and hopefully take a little bit of a mystery out, make it a little bit more approachable.

Alrighty, Nathan. So, we're talking about wire again, Wiring 2.0. So, as you mentioned and you know, we're going to walk you through the differences between the wattage and line-level signal, you know what it all means. So yeah, let's go ahead and get it started. We have a neat little visual diagram to kind of lay it out better for you too. So, we'll kind of dive into that as well. So, yeah, take it away.

All right. So, first things first, last time on wire, I showed you a bunch of different sizes of wire. When one is more appropriate for 70-volt versus eight-ohm, that kind of thing. One thing I never showed you - the inside of the wire. Wow. So if you look here, this is an 18 gauge wire with which once again I told you that it has a little twist on it because it's actually two wires twisted over one another. I'm still not gonna get too technical cause I'm still not an electrical engineer, but that can help with a noise reduction in things like electromagnetism. Ooh, yeah. Webster, where are you at? Yeah, exactly. But inside you've got two different leads inside this because this is two-conductor wire. Most speaker wire is two-conductor non-shielded wire. Most of the time you don't have shield in speaker wire coming from us.

We'll talk about that with you if you need to talk to us about it a little further. But you've got two leads. I've already stripped this back. Some trustee wire strippers earlier. Basically, I would just strip these individual leads and make those connections at the speaker. Or if there was a speaker connector, like a speak on connector, quarter-inch connector, I can solder these on with a quarter-inch connector. I could twist them onto the speak on connector, in order to make the connection at my speaker. Most 70-volt mixer amplifiers are going to have either a Euro block or Phoenix plug connector or just screw terminals where these wires are going to end up. So this is obviously skinny wire, which is very useful for us. And transitioning to our diagram here. Okay. So, to make things real clear for you guys, the wire that we talked about previously, last week, whenever that was, whenever the summers in Florida, the skinny wire we were talking about is what's going to go from basically the amplifier to the speaker.

You've got black and red here, obviously. Yeah. That's our black and our red inside of this one cable. So, this cable is not just one of these, it's actually both. These two conductors as we call them are inside of this one cable. Gotcha. There's a connection at the positive, connection at the negative. Like we went over, this can be an amplifier that's 70-volt or 8-ohm. Regardless of which one, it's important to know which size wire do I need. The reason being, if we run this skinny wire very long distances in low impedance in eight-ohm, we're giving a very small pathway from the amplifier to go to the speaker. That can result in not enough wattage making it from the amp to the speaker. So even though you might have tons of wattage here, if this distance is too long or this cable too skinny, you're not going to end up with enough signal making it to the speaker.

So, it might not be loud enough. There's also something, a fancy term called a dampening factor, which can mean that you might actually end up with less high frequencies at the speaker. So, a worst sounding speaker. The way you can kind of think about this with too small of a wire, kind of like, you know when you turn on your garden hose and somebody steps on it, not enough is making it to the end. Yup. Same concept. We've got not enough electrical contact there to let all the wattage make it to the speaker for it to do what it needs to. That makes sense. So, when we get a bigger wire, we've got a bigger garden hose, more water's coming out. Yep. So, using the right kind of cable can ensure that your amplifier does what it needs to and the speaker gets as much of that energy as possible and sounds as good as it can.

But that's not the only place where cabling or wiring is involved in a system package. Yeah. Yeah. You also see we've got a microphone, a mixer, and an amplifier that one of our wonderful web team drew up for us. Yeah. So, the speaker wire that we mentioned previously is all just for this portion, which I would say is all carrying wattage. That's actually, electrical signal coming from your amplifier to your speaker. That electrical signal actually physically causes your speaker to move. And when that speaker moves, it's creating disturbances in the air that you then hear. So, that's one place where cabling and wiring is very important. We also got to get the signal to the amplifier. Like I mentioned, we've got two conductors here, positive and a negative, but we have a different kind of signal going from the mixer to the amplifier.

That can actually be a much thinner gauge cable, which actually carries audio signal. So this is small, like not even a volt type of signal, like a, you think of your nine-volt battery or your AA battery. This is less than that. And that this is actually a microphone cable with a bare end on the other side, which is called a balanced cable. So it actually is a positive or white cable, a negative, a black, and then a shield or a ground. So, it's ground. Those three cables actually correspond to the three connectors on this microphone cable. Gotcha. This is the kind of cable, for instance, I would use to plug in a wired microphone into a 70-volt mixer amplifier. Okay. So this cable could go right here. Sometimes there's another end on this mic cable. Sometimes not.

That just depends on the kind of amplifier you're using, the kind of mixer you're using. But, the thing to take into mind here is that this mic cable is not carrying wattage. It's not carrying electrical signal, music notes. Exactly. Yeah, that's it. Exactly. Traveling music notes through wires. So as a result, this cable can be much smaller. We might sell, you know, these as a 22-gauge wire, a 24-gauge wire sometimes, or 20 gauge, that's fine. It doesn't need to be the thick 12-gauge stuff like we're doing on the big wires. Reason being we're carrying audio signal, not electricity. So, this same mic cable may also be used to come out of the output out of the mixer into the amplifier. Basically, microphone comes in, mixer ramps up the signal, lets you make any adjustments to the equalizer or anything like that that you might need.

Then spits it out to drive it into the amplifier. The amplifier is our power station in this a kind of application here. It ramps up the signal into wattage out of our speaker cable, right into our speaker to deliver what you need. So, important to note that speaker wire and microphone cable, very different. Once again, sometimes this mixer and this amplifier might be the same thing in a 70-volt commercial application, no big deal, still works the same way inside. And it's still important to know that you have the right kind of cable going from your amp to your speaker. Absolutely, absolutely. So once again, if you have questions about what kind of cable is right for you, what kind of application you have going on, where we can help with any issues in your system signal chain.

Yeah, reach out to us. You can email me directly, nathan@proacoustics.com and I'm coltin@proacoustics.com. That's Coltin with an I. Or give us a buzz on our 800 number (888) 256-4112 or that's sales@proacousticsusa.com. Or check out the site, www.proacousticsusa.com. You can also check out our Amazon store or any of our system packages we have out there. Make sure and drop us a like, subscribe to us. Let us know there's more of you guys out there. Let us know what we can help with, any applications where you might need a hand and don't be a stranger now. All right, until next time, I'm Coltin and I'm Nathan. See ya.