Best Speaker Cables?

Home depot lamp cord.

just buy 12 gauge from any store. it's all the same. if anyone tells you otherwise, they are retarded

Depends on the length of the run and the lowest impedance of your speakers. I'm all for using the minimum required, simply because it'll be smaller and thus easier to hide. The chart on this page by McIntosh's former head of acoustic research is good: http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm Obviously, it's all wire. The brand name, source, etc., does not matter.

It isn't even water cooled.

Monster.

Especially if you buy the ones with plug-in ends. Stripping wire and rethreading it time after time gets pretty tedious.

What's your budget for the wire? Do you need to biwire?

I like Kimber and Cardas the best. Kimber 8TC is a really good budget cable.

Everybody sells banana plugs. Monster tends to be rather overpriced. I also hold the firm in special disdain because Noel Lee started the whole mythology about audio wire. (That said, for a while they marketed top-quality subwoofers under the M-Design name, with beautiful cabinets and about the best drive units one can buy off-the-shelf.) Nobody "needs to," or should, buywire. (Buywiring is different from biamping, assuming one is also using active crossovers a la Andre's Linkwitz Orions, or line-level passive crossovers. With standard passive crossovers, biamping doesn't make a difference either, and is better spelled buyamping.) Budget? Are you insane? Only a deaf idiot would pay that much for wire! (And if you think it makes the slightest bit of difference, do a blind test with me with a significant wager attached. Your Maggies or my Tannoys should both be of suitable resolution to prove that wires don't do shit.) Speaker wire shouldn't cost more than a buck a foot, with high quality bananas or spades adding maybe $10-15 to that for a pair of speaker wires, tops. For those too lazy to crimp twirl a screw-driver on the set screw of a banana, Blue Jeans Cable offers custom lengths of high quality wire (at worst, better than what one may find from Monster, Kimber, Cardas, Tara Labs, Audioquest, etc.) at reasonable prices. However, it seems to me that it takes less time and effort to terminate wires than it does to measure, so I just buy speaker wire by the spool and banana plugs from a local source or Parts Express.

Make sure you get the gold-plated Styrofoam cups, too. Those cables and its discerning owners deserve no less.

--Andre

It isn't even Deep Cryogenically Treated to align the copper crystals!

Serious question: do you even need to terminate it with bananas or spades? If your speaker terminals have the 'hole' under the threads, you can just put the stripped bare wire in. By removing the spade/banana terminal, you just remove another link in the chain from amp to speaker no?

Unless of course you switch speakers or cables on a regular basis.

I thought this belonged in Dumb Threads but wasn't quite sure.

Blue Jeans sells the Canare 4S11 which I've been using for a while. In general, if you get 12 gauge cable, you should be pretty set for almost any situation for runs up to 50 feet. 12 AWG is the point where the series resistance of the cable is low enough to be unaffected by most speakers' input impedance, but isn't big enough yet for its own self-inductance to start causing audible loss in the highest octave. Fancy cables like Kimber 8TC use braiding to lower this point further without raising inductance if you need even lower series resistance, but at the cost of higher capacitance, which can destabilize some amps. This is not a normal situation, but I need to plug two pairs of cables into one amplifier output (I need to drive two woofers in parallel), and the hole isn't big enough to accommodate a pair of 11 AWG cable, so I use stacking dual-bananas from Radio Shack. Also, I don't like the messiness of the strands sticking out, oxidizing, and also possibly breaking off, so if I do bare, I like to tin the ends first, but then it's hard to tighten down the screw because solder is pretty hard, and the contact area isn't that big. Kimber makes a cleverly-designed spade called the Postmaster: imagine the tines of two spades in parallel, one on top of each other, but with a squishy material in between. The squishy material pushes the spades apart as you squish them in a binding post, so you can tighten the post just using your fingers, and have a pretty secure connection. It works very well. Here's a picture: --Andre

Yes I forgot to mention that the ends should be finished in solder.

I've seen something similar from WBT, I think it is their 'Nextgen' spades.