bo_knows
Addicted to Fun and Learning
I was just answering your questions.I really don't have any desire to change things. I was surprised in the video that step was recommended.
I was just answering your questions.I really don't have any desire to change things. I was surprised in the video that step was recommended.
Does it matter that there is thin gauge wire inside the speaker?
Should we open our speaker cabinets now and remove this wire and install thicker gauge wire to gain better audio quality?
Paul M. did himself no favors in that video promoting 10 or 12 gauge wire for internal speaker wiring. That is nonsense. However, he is correct about the other extreme of small gauge wire being widely used. Good quality copper wire is the right choice. Gauge based on current carrying design requirement, with a safety margin. Everything else in the signal path should be good quality also.
There are technical reasons voice coil wire has to be small. Not the least because it is part of the driver moving mass. Small voice coil wire does not correlate to small gauge everything feeding it being acceptable. If you start down the path of taking speakers apart, there is more than just wire that can be changed to possibly, emphasize possibly, change the sound. As an example in another thread, an inexpensive Pioneer speaker is "improved" with some modifications at one time offered by Dennis Murphy.
The resistance of a wire is a product of its length and gauge. A long wire needs to be thick in order to have low resistance. A short wire doesn't (within reason... Just do the math, and you're safe). So no, it doesn't matter.
Great post! That shows just how little the wiring affects the sound. Standard run of the mill OFC 12ga speaker wire is overkill for 99% of home systems. Then to have an 18 inch piece of 16 ga wire go to your speakers drivers does not matter. I have put 10 amps continuous into 22ga wire with no ill effect to the wire. The wire just does what the wire does, it allows the electrons to flow with minimal resistance. For human hearing? internal wires do not matter as long as they are 16 to 18ga. You have to remember and I'm just guessing here, but probably 95% of the people who care about audio are always obsessing over the wrong thing. The lack of knowledge keeps so many companies in business that should be out of business. ASR "tries" to educate but even on this fantastic site snake oil and obsessing over nothing important is done every single day.Measure the voice coil resistance of a typical 8 Ohm driver, it will be about 6 Ohms (maybe a little more). One thousand feet of 18AWG wire will also have about a 6 Ohm resistance. It's a series circuit, so a small wire size chance just a few feet long won't have any impact.
That's not how large companies operate. If they can save a few pennies you can bet the part will get substituted.All decent speaker manufacturers (e.g. the likes of KEF, Revel etc) will have maximised the performance of their product. If they thought that a few extra pennies on the internal wiring would have given an advantage they’d have seized the opportunity.
The difference between the mediocre quality audio we find in consumer products and pretty good audio is a few pennies...That's not how large companies operate. If they can save a few pennies you can bet the part will get substituted.
I think they do believe it. We all want to feel like we belong in a group and the different factions in audio are groups and to those that have risen to be in the leadership it probably feels quite good. His belief may have started before he had information to counter it and it has been reinforced by the people he surrounds himself with throughout the years.Serious question: Do these mongers of BS actually believe what they say, or do they just say it anyway? I know the pressure is on to maintain a continuous stream of clickbait...
But he is personable and folksy and people really like that. Who wants their audio designed by someone boring?I watched about thirty videos and have grown dismayed with some of the advice given. I realize there will be a bias because he is selling audio products, but some of the conclusions are not based on science or data but conjecture.
He never has and never will.Paul was agitated by this and opined that it was not a good practice but did not offer any scientific data that it undermined audio quality,
Yes, we should discard the undersized rubbish voice coils that an engineer has already considered and selected and wind our own and then shoe horn the much improved fat voice coil into the air gap with a mallet.What about the very thin wire in the drivers' voice coils? That's where it all ends up.