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.

forbidden The hot topic again eh! Stephen and I agree on quite a few things, [/QUOTE wrote:

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That's no problem.  You have always proven to be very knowledgable about many things, and I respect your for that.  I guess sometimes you just have to disagree about something.

forbidden wrote:

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but I will continue to use 1 12 gauge speaker wire for subs (or larger / smaller) depending on the subs / amp combination.

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That's no problem.  You have always proven to be very knowledgable about many things, and I respect your for that.  I guess sometimes you just have to disagree about something.

forbidden wrote:

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but I will continue to use 1 12 gauge speaker wire for subs (or larger / smaller) depending on the subs / amp combination.

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And you know, it won't hurt a thing.  In fact when I am done, I will probably be using 8 awg wire on the part that you can see.  It won't help performance any, but it sure will look impressive.

forbidden wrote:

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 There is a reason that manufacturers put big output terminals on amplifiers, it is so they can carry current.

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Actually I think it is because there is a demand for the larger terminals from the customer.  If someone is going to show off their amp (which the manufacturer likes them to do), it would look really silly to have 18 awg wire coming off of it.  The larger awg wire looks better, so might as well offer it.  In fact my little 50 watts by two channel Soundstream amp had 4 awg power connection and 8 awg speaker wire connections.  Do you really think it needed that?

[QUOTE=forbidden] I'm sure that if I talked to the same CEO he would tell me the same things he told Stephen, if I called around again to different manufacturers again I'm sure they would tell a different story. I'm sure that if you were to ask the CEO at Adire about using a smaller guage wire than 16 to run subs he would tell you it's not a good idea (again dependent upon the sub / amp combo), by this fact it can be derived that a smaller guage wire is not a good idea. So is a 12 gauge or 8 gauge wire a waste of $, definitely not. Stephen and I can agree to disagree and I expect we will , no harm done though.

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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.

forbidden wrote:

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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.

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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.  

forbidden wrote:

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 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.

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Very interesting, and a very good point. 

forbidden wrote:

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 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 $?

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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:

https://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):

forbidden wrote:

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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.

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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.

Ketel22 wrote:

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why not use all of what you can. use the largest gauge that the speaker and amp will allow? the price difference isnt a huge thing, your only using 10ft max of speaker wire for your subs.

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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

Here's a picture to illustrate G4uk's point.  It is the voice coil for a Brahma 10 that is rated per EIC-268-5 at 1600 watts RMS and 4800 watts peak.

Focus, focus, damn camera

my bad....i meant "isnt worth the money". 

I suck at typeing.

Where'd my edit button go?

forbidden wrote:

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Focus, focus, damn camera

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I can't afford a digital camera, so I use those disposable camera's and put them on CD.  Unfortunately they don't do "up close" worth crap.  But I do have some other cool pictures like that on my webpage.