What size speaker wire?

Is there  a wire chart or anything for the size of speaker/sub wire to be used in relation to the amount of wattage going to the speaker/sub.

Ex: 1400 watts to 1 solo L715

or 750 watts to 1 solo L7 15?

any info would be great.

anything higher than 12 guage is worth the money.

Definitely no harm done.  But I will continue to say that larger than 16 awg isn't NEEDED.  It's just nice.

The CEO, Dan Wiggins, was with me when I bought the 18 awg wire for my sub (he designed) so I could enter it into a competition that day.  It was going to my Arc amp (roughly 1200 watts rms) to my Brahma 10 in a .36 cubic foot sealed enclosure.  As you know, to get loud in such a small enclosure, you need a great deal of power.  So that "great deal of power" had to run through that 18 awg wire for my sub to pull the 142.3 dB that it hit.  So as you can tell, that wire didn't effect it any.

Stephen, one day when you have time, lets get you to put your sub into a larger box and then try it with both your 18 gauge wire and a 12 gauge wire, I would be interested in hearing (no pun intended) the results. True about what you wrote, Soundtream makes some rally nice equipment (drool), at the manufacturing process it is much more expensive to use two different sized parts (speaker terminal blocks) for different amplifiers as compared to the one size fits all. When a company like Soundstream that for years hand built their amplifiers, the added cost of extra parts definitely added up, just one of the reasons as to why Soundstream used the large output terminals on all of their amplifiers. Now the Reference 300 was a dual purpose amplifier, it had two available settings for it, high power and HIGH CURRENT. The power supply would switch voltage rails in order to drive the amp differently for differing loads, like your favorite old 6x9's in high power setting and a big sub in high current setting. I am sure that there are many more reasons that manufacturers do use these larger speaker outputs as well.

Just so I know, what kind of terminals are on the sub that you have? And if they are binding posts or screwdown terminals and they were built to take a larger guage wire, then why would the person why designed it tell you that it was not necessary to use the larger guage wire? Would he then not have put the normal old push on connectors on it to save some $?

I'll still disagree with you, but I definitely will try a 18gauge wire on a couple of customers boxes so I can see and hear firsthand. Pretty confident that I know where the 12 gauge wire will be going back to though. So for now we can agree to disagree.

Why a larger enclosure?  The smaller enclosures will require more power to produce the same amount of output.  That's part of Hoffman's Iron Law.  

Very interesting, and a very good point. 

Here's a link to some pictures of the old style Brahma and the Mark II Brahma.  The Mark II is the one with the 12 spoke basket:

http://community.caraudiotalk.com/index.php?showtopic=2154&st=15

I think he used terminals that took larger wire for the reasons I mentioned above.  Some people, like me, will want to reverse mount their subs.  This means that the speaker wire will be showing.  18 awg wire doesn't look too impressive coming from such a large speaker.  It would be much more impressive to see 8 awg.  Here's an example of 18 awg wire being used (and is the setup I mentioned earlier):

Actually try 16 awg wire instead.  Remember he said "larger than 16 awg isn't needed".  It's just that at the time our shop had just ran out of 16 awg wire, and all I could find locally before the competition was 18 awg wire.  So that was what I used.  But as you could tell it didn't seem to make any difference.

I'm not saying not to.  In fact I could get 1/0 awg wire pretty cheap, so I did even though I didn't need wire that big at the time.  I'm just saying it isn't necessary.

This seems to be an ongoing source of mystery where there should be none, there is a calcuclus for working out current vs impedence or average impedence across 4ohms at a given range of freqs, do i really have to dig out my old study books for the math ? lol.

Simplest way...turn over the driver and look at the leads from the posts to the voice coil.....what do you see,heavy gauge ? no, what you see is surprisingly light gauge wire and i know this is only a short distance for the current to be carried but it does illustrate the point, we really don't need the heavy stuff but if Joe public wants to pay for it and if he likes the look then fine...technically there is no practical need for it but i'll still use the heavy gauge....go figure LOL.

G4uk