On this episode of Pro Acoustics Tech Talk, Nathan and Coltin are diving into the ins and outs of speaker wire and which speaker wire options are best for different applications.
Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of Pro Acoustics Tech Talk. I'm Nathan, I'm Coltin and we are here today to talk to you guys about all different kinds of speaker wire, which speaker wire is most appropriate for your application. We’ll hopefully take some of the guesswork out of it and explain a little bit more about wire.
All right Nathan. So, I have a bunch of wire in front of me right now. Basically, go over with me what we have, you know, as far as the different thicknesses, why it matters, what do we use this for? You know, I want to kind of learn a little bit about what wire has to offer.
Yeah, sure, sure. So, what we've got here is a commercial grade speaker wire made from West Penn Wire, which is one of our most popular manufacturers of wire made here in the United States. This is all commercial grade with a PVC jacket. Basically, the jacket on the wire here, you know, is made out of PVC. Like essentially plastic, like the pipe, which gives it a certain thickness and a certain toughness. But we've got some different gauges here. We've got over here, this big one. This is AQ227. That is their all-weather 12-gauge, two conductor wire. We also have the conventional 227, which is just a two conductor, stranded, 12-gauge wire, the thick stuff for a lot of our high wattage application. Gotcha. And then we've also got 16-gauge, which you'll find we use a lot in a lot of our commercial designs. And then we've got 18-gauge. So, if you don't know a whole lot about how the gauge of wiring works, the lower the number, the bigger the wire, not the higher the number, the bigger the wire. Kind of like, well we're both hillbillies that grew up here in central Texas, so, it's kind of like shotgun shells. The lower the number, the bigger the wire.
There you go. Oh yeah, exactly. So, why does it matter? Well, basically with thicker gauge wire, you have more contacts. This is what's called stranded wire. So, you have more individual stranded leads inside there. Okay. So, this isn't the stuff that you pull in your house, which is what's called solid core wire, which is actually a solid copper conductor through there. Which means that I can do this, I can bend it, I can bend it and conduit, which makes life really easy when you're installing a speaker wire instead of the solid stuff. So basically, by using thicker gauge wire, we can make sure that the wattage coming from the amplifier gets where it needs to be without losing a whole lot in between.
That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. So as far as just application based, I know we've went over, you know, 70-volt and 8 ohm in previous videos. So where does wire kind of fall into that subject matter? And, why does it matter in that regard? So, what can we get away with in a 70-volt application with like you mentioned, the smaller wire to big wire. Why is there such a difference? And you know what can we see out of both applications with wire?
Right. Yeah, no problem. So, based on the impedance of the signal of the wattage, or the impedance of the speaker, it changes essentially the wattage type that's going to the speaker. So, in a 70-volt system, we're able to use much thinner gauge wire than we would if it was a low impedance system. To kind of give you an idea, a lot of audio is measured in decibels, you know, three decibels being half as loud or, or twice as loud as what you were listening to at the time. Gotcha. So in like the case of an eight-ohm speaker, if we were to use this little bitty thin stuff here, the 18-gauge wire, if we were to run that, you know, the length of like a speaker that's pretty far away in like a stadium or something like that. If we ran this wire about 200 feet, we would almost lose 50% of the wattage. So yeah, half of the sound. No good. But instead, if we do this big thick 12-gauge stuff, the all-weather stuff to make sure that we keep out sun, moisture, rain, all that kind of stuff, if we use this big thick stuff before we get 50% loss, we can actually run 959 feet. That's a huge difference. Now we don't really want to do that. We want to try to avoid pulling that much cable whenever possible. But as you can see, it matters a lot what gauge you use. For most of our 70-volt applications, you're going to find us using approximately 16-gauge, maybe 14-gauge. We don't have 14-gauge here with us today, but basically you look at a 12-gauge, you look at a 16-gauge, it's somewhere right there in the middle.
Yeah. But the idea being, even though this wire is skinnier, it can still handle much more wattage in a 70-volt system because of the nature of the electrical signal itself. Gotcha. Now, I don't proclaim to be an electrical engineer. There's a lot of other complicated stuff that goes into there. But for our purpose here, with a 70-volt system, we can use 16-gauge and 14-gauge to run longer distances, more wattage, as long as we're using 70-volts speakers. What you'll also find is that this is what's called twisted pair wiring that I mentioned earlier. You'll see it's not exactly round. A lot of the stuff you have at the house, if you've ever bought a home receiver, you know, has like one smooth wire or it's got two wires side by side. Yeah. Like that lamp cord or that red and black or that a clear color stuff.
That's not what we're going to find a from West Penn or from a lot of our commercial grade manufacturers. This is going to be what's called twisted pair. And if you see how there's kind of a rolling sensation that actually twists of the wire on top of itself. So your positive wire, your negative wire, they're going to twist on top of one another. Why do they do that? It's got a lot to do with electromagnetism and running side by side wire long distances, which I don't want to get too in depth with all of that. Yeah, we don't need Bill Nye or Mr. Wizard here, but basically what that means is we can run this twisted pair of wiring near fluorescent lights or things like that and commercial applications without having to worry about as much buzz or hum, or turning it into an FM antenna and picking up a lot of, you know, the Tejana radio station down the street and that kind of thing.
So twisted grade wire is the way to go. If you've got questions about which kind of wire you need for your application, you guys know where to find us. (888) 256-4112 is our direct line or you can reach us at www.proacousticsusa.com. And if you want to talk directly to one of us here, definitely shoot us over an email. You can reach me at [email protected] or [email protected]. And let us know you like what we're doing here. Drop a question down below. If we can help with a particular topic that you'd like to know more about or a product we can help you with, certainly give us a shout. Checkout our Amazon store, our EBay store. We've also got wire for sale and a lot of other products on our website and let us know what we can do to help and improve your audio systems.
Until next time. I'm Colton, I'm Nathan. Signing off.
