Speaker Cables

What kinds of termination will the binding posts accept? Banana plugs? If not, spade lugs may be your best choice.

Once you figure that out, just drop your price point by an order of magnitude, and check out Monoprice. Or, if you want to splurge a little, order wire and terminations from Blue Jeans Cable.

Make some yourself. Get some multi-strand, oxygen free, 12AWG and put the ends on yourself.

This is how I currently make my speaker cables. Hope this helps.

Just an aside, in about a week, I will get three 100" rolls of 18AWG, Teflon coated multi-strand wire and braid them to create a braided, multi-strand cable. The point, if you want to go fancy, you can.



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Edited by BeeMan458 - 7/27/12 at 7:17pm

16 Ga is plenty for a ten foot run. Plugs aren't necessary, other than for convenience.

Make sure that each wire is the specified gauge and avoid crap like the Pyramid RSW12100

Sure it is but everything I do and advise regarding speakers is with 12AWG. That way you only have to buy one roll of cable. At the price of wire, the difference in price for a hundred foot roll is negligible. Plugs are necessary if you want your speaker cables to look cool and have a professionally finished look. For the sake of a few bucks, don't be quick to throw cool under the bus. Shrink wrapping the ends always helps creates a nice professionally finished look also; red and black shrink wrap tubing.

Yep!

Don't forget to keep fun in the "hobby."



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Edited by BeeMan458 - 7/27/12 at 9:15pm

If you don't mind spending more than you have to for something that works no better that's your choice. Others may have different priorities.

I like to use plugs because they are better at keeping in stray wires and preventing a short.

If you have binding posts, you can just bend the pins into a hook shape so they will go around the binding post and then you can tighten down on them solidly.

The other thing you can do is get banana plugs and attach the wires to them.

Which I don't. Making and having things that look good are part and parcel to the human condition and has been since the beginning of recorded time so no, I don't mind spending more than I have to and others may have priorities different than you. They don't mind spending a few extra dollar to gain the convenience and good looks terminating their speaker wire ends bring to the physical conversation.

It's not always about pinching a penny. I want my cables to look good and my advice is going revolve around how one can make their worry free speaker cables look good. To quote you: "...others may have priorities different than you." Most people care how their home, yard, car, hair, nails and tool locker looks and the same applies to speaker cables. That's normal and that's where my advice is going come from.

Good news, today, all you need is a screwdriver.

These banana clips have opposing threaded screws to lock the stripped wire in place.



Strip the wire, insert the wire into the open end of the banana plug, tighten the two screws, screw the bezel collar on and voila!, terminated banana plug ends. High cool factor.



The problem with bare wire is, you have to loop the wire around the post and then crank the locking knob down on the exposed wire. Over the days, weeks and months, the wire compresses and the wire loosens and unless tightened again, you get a loose contact and this is not good. That doesn't happen with properly terminated wire ends.

The sky's the limit in how much you want to fancy your speaker cables up. I like fancy looking. I like fancy looking women, cars, houses, boats, et cetera.



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Edited by BeeMan458 - 7/28/12 at 9:50am

I use similar style banana plugs, doesn't get much easier than that.

Hey Stan, welcome to the forum. The diy approach to speaker cables are both fun and rewarding, I didn't do any soldering but I did acheive a very nice looking cable for my system.

Monoprice speaker cable is a good place to start, decent cable, decent price. The largest gage is 12, that's what I used for my system and works great. Here a few pics of my effort;





Monoprice also is priced reasonably. You don't have to do anything fancy, just get home and hook it up.

Here are the ones I did for my system.

Those are really sharp! They may not sound any better, but they sure look a lot better than the plain Jane cable jacket!

How do you guys do the covering sleeve? Or do you buy the cable already with the sleeve cover on? Also how do you guys do the ends? I'm interested in making my cables look better .

One can buy the covering for a very reasonable cost.

Cool. Thanks for the link. For the ends I see something similar to shrink wrap is that what it is if you want to do the ends individually?

I ordered this shrink wrap kit yesterday.

I was turned onto this product yesterday by one here. Speaker wire pants.

Cool, I'm going to Harbor Freight and they've got shrink wrap kits for $5.00 bucks. New project for the weekend.

^^ Cable pants.
Available from lots of other places too.

For connectors, I use banjo/ring lugs, similar to spades. However, I own the crimpers. These are about $20/100 and even if you don't want to buy a crimper, there should be an electrician nearby who'd do them for a nominal fee (couple of beers, maybe) if you had everything stripped and ready to go and took them to him. 10 minutes work.
Edited by A9X-308 - 7/28/12 at 4:32pm

Cable pants sound like a good idea too thank. Sorry for deviating from the OP's thread.

Never been to a Harbor Freight. The local store has a small selection of shrink wrap tube. I want to find ten or twenty-five foot rolls of black and red in the diameters of my choosing.

They should have black and red. You have to watch the quality of HF's stuff. It's pretty much hit or miss.

I've used the HF shrink wrap for car audio stuff and works great.

That must be one of their good products. I had a smaller hammer drill that bored a single hole and then died on me. So I upgraded to the 1" SDS and so far it has worked well.

I don't really buy electrical tools from them. I normally buy Craftman stuff, but a couple of weeks ago I needed an electrical drill to make some hole through walls. I bought a $35 dollars drill from HF, and it worked great. It was on sale too! Regular price was $74.99.

Surprised no one's mentioned Blue Jeans Cable: http://www.bluejeanscable.com. They offer both a 10-guage and 12-guage in white (aptly named 10-White and 12-White) to blend in with most rooms. Unless you think you need a prestige name, these cables are no-excuses solid performers.

As for the connection points, have you considered bare wire? FWIW, Blue Jeans Cable offers both options somewhere on their site.

Hope this helps.

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