Posted by Wayne Parham on April 12, 2002 at 13:23:35

In Reply to: 14ga romex for speaker cable and X/O wiring posted by mhammill on April 11, 2002 at 22:10:13:

14 guage wire will work just fine. Speaker circuits are low impedance balanced pairs, which is about as tolerant and invulnerable to noise as you can get. But I think I would still twist the wires together to form a braid.

If you put signal wires in a metal conduit, make sure the conduit is grounded. Never run wires in an ungrounded conduit, particularly low-power, unbalanced signal wires, because the ungrounded conduit will actually couple AC noise into the signal wires, acting as a sort of concentrator.

Here's a link to a page about Belden's speaker cable, and it includes a chart of size/power/distance/ for sound systems. This type of product is best, even better than exotic "boutique" cables. For those of you that like to wind your own coils, here's a good program that gives specifications of various magnet wire products.