Have you ever asked yourself the question: do speaker cables matter?
In short, the answer is yes. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at why you shouldn’t just buy the cheapest speaker cable you can find and help you choose the best speaker cable for your needs.
Tip: If you’re an installer, why not share this resource with your customers to help explain why you’re using a premium cable?
What Is Speaker Cable?
Firstly, in order to work out the best speaker cable for a certain scenario, let’s explore exactly what speaker cable is.
The clue is in the name – speaker cable is a specially designed cable used to carry the electrical connection from an audio amplifier to a set of loudspeakers. It is used in scenarios such as home cinema installations all the way up to huge commercial projects.
Speaker Cable Characteristics
Resistance is a key factor when determining what speaker cable to purchase. Generally speaking, the lower the resistance, the less likely there is to be a reduction in sound quality. A whole series of articles could be written on this subject exploring impedance, resistance, etc., so for the purposes of this post – lower is better!
Wire Gauge
In a nutshell, the thicker the wire, the less resistance. Once the cable run exceeds a certain length, there will be a gradual drop in quality.
At Cable Intelligence, our speaker cable is usually listed in AWG (American Wire Gauge) or at least shows the diameter in millimetres. The lower the gauge number, the thicker the cable and therefore, it has less resistance.
Wire Material
We aim to supply only premium solutions to our customers. It’s for this reason that we don’t stock CCA speaker cable which stands for copper-clad aluminium, rather we opt to supply OFC (Oxygen Free Copper) cable which can also contribute towards lower resistance. The difference here is that OFC is pure copper.
Sheath Material
As above, we don’t compromise on quality when it comes to the outer sheath (that goes for all our cables). As such, the main material we supply is LZOH, which stands for Low Smoke Zero Halogen.
As well as this, some of our speaker cable outer sheaths provide extra protection in the form of being CPR-rated. CPR stands for construction products regulations and is essentially a set of rules that the cable has to adhere to with regards to reaction to fire.
While this does not contribute to the lowering of resistance, purchasing CPR-rated cable vastly improves the safety of the installation and could save lives in the event of a fire.
Note: some of our speaker cable is Euroclass Cca rated. This is not the same as CCA cable.
Where To Buy Speaker Cable
As you can see, there are plenty of factors that contribute to the effectiveness of speaker cable. Luckily, as we’ve discussed in this post, we only supply high-quality cable, which means that if you buy your speaker cable from us, you know that it will be oxygen-free copper, with a fire-resistant outer sheath, making your install effective and safe.
So in a nutshell – buy from Cable Intelligence and you can’t go wrong! Right now, we recommend the Aura AV range of speaker cable.