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Your opinions on how to string 25 ft speaker cables

I am running them through a hole in floor to crawl space, then up through floor to speakers. There are four cables to each speaker (Bi-wired)B&W 604s2 plus a subwoofer, Vandersteen 2WQ, (2 cables) nearby. Using 12 AWG two strand 99.9 copper nothing special cable from Monoprice. Should they be twisted around each other, or run separately and far apart, or in some other magical configuration for best of the best of the best, sound?
kavakat1

Showing 2 responses by kijanki

kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,446 posts
 
Twisted !!! Twisting reduces inductance of the cable and shields the cable from external electric and electromagnetic interference (preventing induced noise entry back to the amp). It is because both wires are exposed evenly to external fields. Twisting might increase capacitance but it is secondary issue with speaker cables (low source and load impedance).

Light twist (1" pitch) should be enough, while it won't increase capacitance too much.  Use drill, to obtain even twist.


kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,446 posts
 
12 gauge wire has about 340nH/ft inductance. It is 17uH for 2x25ft wire and represents impedance of 2.14 ohm at 20kHz. Bringing wires closer reduces inductance, twisting reduces it further.

As for high levels - levels for bass peaks will be in tens of volts, but levels for the soft tweeter sounds might be in milivolts. Any wire hanging is an antenna that feeds electrical noise into the amp. Speaker output post is an input for negative feedback while output impedance is low only for low frequencies.

Twisting pitch should be much smaller than the wavelength of the highest frequency we want to defeat. Wavelength of common 2.4GHz is 4.9".
1" twist pitch should be sufficient.
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