I recently purchased a house that has a dedicated HT room, the only issue is that it is wired with 16 gauge speaker wire (and only 5.1). I'm planning on going 7.1 for the room and currently none of the speaker wire is out to a face plate (just somewhere in the walls) so I need someone to find the wires and wire the room for 2 more speakers. The question is, do you think it's worth it to rewire everything to upgrade the 16 gauge speaker wire (I was thinking 10 gauge from BlueJeansCable)? ...also, if you would recommend rewiring is 10 gauge overkill for this?
My setup:
Front L/R: Mirage OMD-28
Center: Mirage OMD-C2
Rears & Surrounds: Mirage OMD-5
Sub: Mirage S10
Unless you are doing runs from 100 feet 10 gauge cable is overkill. 16 gauge is fine for an 8 ohm load up to about 20 feet. 14 gauge for about 35 feet, and 12 gauge for 60 feet. realistically, unless you have the hearing of a dog the loss of sound you will get for longer lengths of 16 gauge are negligible. For all intents and purposes replacing the wire is fine if that is what you want to do, but, it is pointless.
Read the Roger Russel paper. He recommends no more than 5%. Yes, the power loss can be easily compensated for but the impedance mismatch cannot. In some amps this can have an adverse effect on frequency response. Especially with tube amps, not so much with modern solid state amps.
Not really an "impedance mismatch" so much as just added impedance.
Tube amps already have fairly high output impedance so you'd probably notice a change with wire gauge less than with SS amps. It also depends heavily upon the speaker's impedance, natch.
I wrote a little thread over on WBF comparing various output impedances (which can include wires) and simulating how it impacts frequency response using several amplifier and speaker models.
True, but it is still an issue. Tube amps aren't happy running into higher impedance loads than their tap rating. Not that 10% would affect anything, you'd have to be seriously under gauged to have a problem, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility.
Yes, of course. They aren't terribly happy running into loads much lower than the tap either, one reason I am not a big fan of tube amps on ESL's or dynamic speakers with large (or just "significant") impedance variations over frequency. But, as you said, we're talking about speaker wires here and the change in net impedance from a tube amp is much smaller than from a SS amp due to the much lower output impedance of a SS amp. That is why I say the noticeable difference due to a wire change is more audible (if at all) with a SS amp. And agree it'd have to be a pretty undersized wire for any of this to matter...
But another way to look at it is the power vs voltage matching scenario.
A tube amp is a power matched circuit. Best energy transfer takes place if the load and source impedances are matched.
A solid state amp is more of a voltage matched circuit. Since the output impedance is fractions of an ohm, it's less influenced by the speaker and cable load.
But I agree the differences between 5% & 10% are probably miniscule in real world application.
I'm an RF/mW guy so "matching" to me is a little different than what I thought you were saying.
Variations can be more than you might expect for tube amps; certainly less so for SS amps. I did a few basic simulations a year or three ago: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showt...ponses-into-Speaker-Loads&p=139289#post139289 Be sure to read through the second page for more complex real-world loads and a discussion of amplifier interaction with speakers.
Depends on the amount of work involved. I'm a BIG fan of BJC. It's very affordable and you can sleep well at night, ha. I wouldn't run anything less than 14AWG in a wall. But then I wasted $10 and ran 3 8ft pieces of 10AWG BJC to my mains/cc cause it was cheap.
Since this is in-wall and you are going to have to have someone do the work, get it done. Get it done with 12AWG (or 10) that way you are good to go no matter what changes you may make to amps/speakers in the future. Do it right, do it once.
Well, not all that surprised... In many years of being a radio/TV/stereo tech who did a lot of sound work and various amp repair work on the side I saw a lot of that. Yeah, the distortion goes up, but for that application it was pretty much a don't care. Not all amps are that robust...
OTOH, one amp came in where the guy had taken the (+) and (-) wires from a center-tapped output transformer driving push-pull speakers in a big cabinet and decided he could double the power by twisting the wires together and connecting them to one side of the speakers and the center tap to the other. Gotta' love the smell of burned transformer in the morning... and capacitors, diodes, resistors, etc. Oh, when the fuse blew, he decided it was because of all the power so he replaced it with a jumper made of speaker wire and let it cook a while.
The tractor radio that came in blown because, when the speaker wire got destroyed through some unknown cause, he replaced the wires with baling wire, was another classic.
The tractor radio that came in blown because, when the speaker wire got destroyed through some unknown cause, he replaced the wires with baling wire, was another classic.
Had similar questions on a room rewire. Roger Russell site helped a lot as do the cable recommendations, think I get it now. Thanks!
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