household speaker wire in car install?

[bristolbaron 10]

Anyone know if theres any probs using speaker wire designed for home systems in a car?

I've got some decent quality Gale wire, just thinking of using it to save buying more car wire?

 

cheers,

 

Baz.

[StormVR6 0]

No, it will work, AFAIK the cable isn't made for different ohm's but the thicker the better, I use to use it myself once upon a time!

[RadoAds 0]

Yup use it, it should give better quality sound with a tighter bass, if you believe what you read in the hifi magazines ....mmmmm

[Walesy 0]

yeah i always use home speaker cable cos my mate works in a hi-fi store :norty: ....works a treat.

[bristolbaron 10]

cool! will go ahead tommorrow.

[Not_Aircooled_or_Taxfree 0]

Don't bother getting the expensive pretty looking stuff, it is 4-5 times more expensive then normal speaker cable, but don’t go for the really cack thin household bell wire either. Remember the thicker the wire the better the sound, but also bear in mind that you have to pull it through your car as well and there may not be enough space behind the stereo for it. Look for Wholesalers selling industrial speaker cable (stuff that DJ’s use on their PA) that is what I use in my van and it sounds very good but there is enough space for it.

[Kevin Bacon 5]

Yup use it, it should give better quality sound with a tighter bass, if you believe what you read in the hifi magazines ....mmmmm

 

Yeah....they do like their wire don't they. I can't say I can notice a difference personally but simple physics would dictate you use a large guage cable purely because the sub draws a lot of current, if nothing else.

 

Most common or garden multistrand copper wire is plenty good enough, so long as it has more than 5 strands!

[coolrado 0]

i use QED silver spiral bi-wire cable which is a bit of an overkill but i got it for nothing, its designed for running seperate feeds to the tweeter and mid/bass driver on home hifi but its very handy for running down the car to the left and right sides.

 

i allways thought the claims about different cable giving different sound was complete bullsh*t but a mate of mine who runs a set of final electrostatics off a amp that uses a valve pre amp and a valve cd player when he changed from £2.50 per metre cable to £25 per metre cable the difference was quite noticeable.

but the claims about digital interconnects have been proven to be bullsh*t, a lab tested two sets of equipment one connected together with an expensive VAN DEN HUL digital coax and the other with a coat hanger and they both came up with the same results :lol:

[Kevin Bacon 5]

a lab tested two sets of equipment one connected together with an expensive VAN DEN HUL digital coax and the other with a coat hanger and they both came up with the same results :lol:

 

No way! :lol:

 

Digital signals are on/offs, so cable quality won't really influence the quality of your on/offs unless it's suffering from major interference....which even a £1.99 argos lead can supress!

 

That is funny though, I've always thought they were a con too....

 

Biwire is a top idea for running a single length down the car and then split it into left and right at the dash.....why didn't I think of that??!?!

[dinkus 10]

While there is a noticable difference between the 13 strand 12p a metre crud and some decent Gale stuff at £5 a metre, there's nay on bugger all difference between the £5 and £15 a metre stuff.

 

And as you say, it makes even less difference with digital stuff. Firstly, the digital signal is a lot less susceptible to noise, but even if you do get distortion on the digital signal the chances of you noticing it are minute.

 

Think about it... a CD has a 1,411 kbits of sound information per second, whereas a decent MP3 file has 320k bits of sound information per second. That means that you've lost almost 80% of the information - how much of a difference do you notice?

 

Now take a crappy digital connector (a coat hanger for example) and say that 20% of the signal is mis-read. Are you going to notice? Methinks not.

[Kevin Bacon 5]

The idea of keeping digital signals as clean as possible is stop the error correction circuits from working overtime and muddying the sound.....but it's seldom an issue in the home environments. But in the car, the HU jitter circuits are working overtime!