does speaker wire size matter?

[F150Matt 10+ year member]

I was at that competition yesterday and the host shop is sponsored by power acoustik(go figure) I'm not a big fan of power acoustik at all but the guys are hitting decent numbers in the port with those MOFO subs. I did notice that one guy had 2 12'' mofo's on power acoustik gothic 1600watt max amps...he didn't use regular small speaker wire, he had some 8, or maybe 10 gauge wire going to his subs. Is that overkill or would that increase the output of my subs noticeably? Right now I have like 16 or 18 gauge stinger wiring to the subs...should I get something bigger?

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[KARLEON 10+ year member]

the thicker the wire the more juice you are gettin. If you have small wires, then not too much juice is going to be pump, but if you have a nice fat wire then u kno the effects

 

[bootleg 10+ year member]

That's very mixed. Most subs only have 12 to16 gauge braided inputs from the terminals so going bigger won't actualy help your ouput of the sub, because they still have to go through the bottle neck of that smaller wired at the spider.

 

[F150Matt 10+ year member]

do you know how big of wire I can go with on the L7's? If I'm spending the time to build my own box and possibly get another 1200.1 to run one on each sub then I dont want to lose a decibel because of small speaker wires.

 

[picklekx 10+ year member]

you can go with 12 gauge on the l7s

 

[bootleg 10+ year member]

12 gauge would be sufficient, you won't notice anything beyond that. Maybe a couple hundrenths of a decible on a meter.