Propeller Head Plaza

"Ordinary" magnet wire

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I dug this one up from the past, and I believe it was Dick Pierce's argument about the uselessness of special speaker wire:

"It may be a total shock to some people to know that a typical 8-ohm four layer woofer voice coil contains about 120 feet of number 28 solid copper wire. This wire is all in the circuit with the speaker system hookup wire. It's also much longer than a normal run of hookup wire from the amplifier to the speaker. Even a mid range speaker can have about 30 feet of number 33 solid copper wire and a tweeter can have 20 feet of number 35 solid copper wire."


The "solid copper wire" is magnet wire that is usually very pure copper no matter what the source. And the gauges are small. The funny part about this argument is that I found out myself that for high impedance horns with low current draw (mid/treble horns only) I preferred the sound of pretty ordinary 28 gauge solid copper magnet wire to anything larger or more expensive as a cable. For the bassbins, you can use Romex and it's probably not going to make huge differences.

So what was argued as a proof against wire quality to me showed that voice coils have terrific wire quality already in there.

That's just my own experience and anecdote. I thank Dick Pierce for pointing out the high quality pure copper nice dielectric wire that is being used in speaker voice coils. It helped me think to use it in this one case for a better cable, and oh-so-cheap, too.

I never said price must be high, I have been thinking about what might help more in ordinary available material.

Now why does this work well? The same reason the magnet wire gauge choice is made in the first place for voice coils - it's skin depth optimization for the frequencies covered and that just happens to work well (plus tighter coupling in the coils). A little extra wire resistance on mids/highs does not seem to hurt a lot when used as a speaker wire to it, when so much is already in the voice coils. Mids/tweeters might be better off with some other solution when driven directly from separate amps and electronic crossover, though. Different block diagrams have different optimum solutions for interface.


-Kurt

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