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Best lower end cables for B&W speakers...?

Hello Everyone,
I’m relatively new to mid grade audio equipment and recently purchased a pair of B&W 702 S2’s and a HTM71 S2 center channel. To me, they are very clear and unforgiving speakers. I also use a Velodyne sub, but not all the time. So far I’ve been in love with them but am using borrowed speaker cable, straight 12 guage, to just try.

The Blue Jeans certainly seem reasonable enough, but in my head cables may be more speaker specific than a lot of other applications so I wanted to see if folks had used Canare 4s11 or some other cable that would be 500 and under per pair with their B&W’s. I can get these for 150 and certainly seem reasonable.
At 150, if they don’t work it won’t be the end of the world but figured I’d try here to see what people thought who had B&W’s
goodman770
erik_squires
16,056 posts
 
Personally, mid range wire world because they are dark but help improve imaging.  On the B&Ws they would help smooth out the treble.
hombre
87 posts
 
The wires you're already using are WAYYYY overkill for any speaker no matter how overpriced. Forget wires. Save up for something that actually matters. Like speakers. In fact you could downgrade your wires to 16 ga. zip cord and there would be absolutely no difference in the sound quality.
Unless you, like many others here, imagine there is.
  I brought home a pair of B&W pedestal-mounted small speakers (forgot which model maybe 607?) and hated them. They sounded loud, bright, harsh, with an unlistenable upper-midrange spike in the frequency response. But that's only my opinion so I'm not knocking anyone else's.
  I now have Maggie LRS speakers which are the best thing I ever heard but again, that's just me.
stereo5's avatar
stereo5
6,385 posts
 
I use Canare 4S11 in both my McIntosh based systems. One system is in the 60K range and the other in the 23K range. I had 3K speaker cables before I went with the Canare. Did you know that 90% of all recording studios use Canare 4S11 cables?
soix
9,456 posts
 
Please feel free to completely disregard everything hombre said as it’s pure rubbish from someone who obviously has limited experience in audio.  I mean, what the hell are “pedestal-mounted” speakers???

Anyway, it’d be helpful if you shared what electronics you’re using, and interconnects can be as or more important than speaker cables so let us know what you’re using there too.

As for speaker cables, there’s a pair of Acoustic Zen Satori cables on US AudioMart for $550 that’d likely make a big improvement.  They have a nice refined but still nicely extended treble but will also help by fleshing out the mid and bass tonal density to further balance out the high frequencies.  The Satoris are excellent and well above “mid-level” cables so you’d be moving up several rungs with them IMHO.  BTW, I’ve owned and used them in my own system (in shotgun bi-wire form) for years and compared them to some other good cables and they remain in place.  If I’m wrong you can just turn around and sell them for little/no loss as there’s a fluid market for used AZ cables. 

While the AZs would be my best recommendation, if you’re hesitant to buy used you can try something like Morrow cables that offer a generous in-home trial period and are also very good cables.  But as I mentioned above, don’t ignore your interconnects as they are critical as well.  Anyway, congrats on the new gear and best of luck. 
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