Speaker wires?

atro1

Hi people please advise me.
I have been told that any wire will do for speaker wire I need two very long lengths and I was told that 2.5m2 will do fine as I need something in the region of 30 metres difference in price is substantial.
Any comments please.
Thank you.

ckerrd

Audiophiles will tell you that you need special speaker cable which does cost a fortune. You can use cheap cable and to be honest I doubt if you would hear much of a loss of quality.

biggoldring

go wire-less

mascherano

take a look at richer sounds website, they have nice section on speaker wires and recommendations. There is an element of snake oil about speaker wire, I remember BOSE using extension wire for their sound set-up at a home entertainment conference once.

Psychofly

I usually use computer CAT5 network cable.
Leave it in the outer casing and I have an almost limitless supply of easy to run speaker wiring each with 8 inner cores. Works great

mountainchrisriver

It really does depend a bit on what the rest of the system you have is like... if you have a grands worth of kit then wiring it all together with standard bell wire is a bit pointless, especially over such a long distance: you will lose quality of sound (you must have one mightily big room for a 30m cable run?!) :eek: ... however, if its just a cheap setup then you may well not notice a difference between bell wire and something of better quality... next step up from bell wire would be mains cable, believe it or not it works quite well and is still relatively cheap ! If you need to hide the cable then QED make something call silver micro which lies flat and can be run under carpets... Generally speaking QED cables are of good quality and they have a good selection of budget cables... Here is one place that I have used in the past:

http://www.hificables.co.uk/

As mascherano says, richer sounds also stock relatively inexpensive cables that do a fairly good job if you are not in the realms of audiophile land! A very rough rule of thumb is to spend 10% of what your system cost to wire it all together.

isofa

Totally agree with mountainchrisriver.

QED cables are excellent and if you have a quality set-up you'll definitely notice the difference, but if you don't it's a waste of money, and basic speaker cable from Maplin would be good enough.

If you do have a decent set-up you'll also get a benefit from replacing the cheap interconnect cables (between amp, tuner, CD - if you have separates) with better quality ones.

Have a leaf through the back of a hi-fi mag in a newsagents and see what budget ones they recommend.

atro1

Done.
Set up with .75 cable [that i had in my garage] on a Technics sv290 price ranges from £288-£400. Sounds ok to me. Not received my SVHS lead yet for the DVDs but thats on order and next to do!!
Thanks all for your help.