Speaker cables are the most over-mystified and overrated components of audio systems. Despite the claims of the high-end audio cable industry, what really matters is the careful selection of the wire gauge. Speaker wires have no magical attributes and the signal transmission through a wire is completely understood by engineers and scientists.

This guide is a mixture of well-known facts (e.g. circuit models) and a bit of my own work (experiments, circuit analysis). It’s widely known that inductance loss in speaker cables is negligible up to several meters, but how much is much? I’ve studied the inductance loss in detail and I found that the key concept – besides cable inductance – is the impedance response of tweeters.

Construction

Speaker cables are made of two stranded copper wires surrounded with PVC insulation. The role of the insulation – apart from isolating the two wires from each other – is to prevent the copper from oxidation. There are speaker cables that cost 100$ per meter or more, but in reality these are just ‘audio jewelry’, they look cool, but have no sonic benefits (and some of them can be worse than an ordinary speaker cable). A speaker cable should have very low series resistance and series inductance – and that’s all.

There is a major difference between speaker wires (aka zip-cords) and speaker cables. Speaker cables have an outer jacket, so they are more durable and better for heavy duty live amplification. In addition to this the outer jacket is mandatory for in-wall installation. Speaker wires (zip-cords) have no outer jacket and they are intended to be used in home audio systems (home theater, stereo).

Some cable companies offer speaker cables with twisted wires or tinned copper conductors. Tinned copper has lower oxidation rate than ‘bare copper’ (useful close to the sea). The twisted pair lowers the induced magnetic field around the cable and lowers the voltage induced in the cable by external magnetic fields.