Fabled Cable

[Shojahan]

Ayo mayn,

I saw a used Sony Xplod sub (300 watts RMS) for $30 and decided to buy it as a spare. The guy gave it to me with the speakers cables intact. When I got it home to hook it up for testing, I wondered if he was some kind of lunatic because this sub's speaker cables were massive, larger than my amp's 4G power cable. A closer look at this sub's 'speaker cable' labels indicated they were in fact 2G power cables! Plus the wire strands were silver, and I thought copper only came in brown.

Anyway I was wondering if having excess wire in your cable is in fact a bad thing, because at some point, is there a threshold crossed where you start getting more resistance than conductivity because the cables are far bigger than they need to be?

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[LBC]

Ayo mayn,
I saw a used Sony Xplod sub (300 watts RMS) for $30 and decided to buy it as a spare. The guy gave it to me with the speakers cables intact. When I got it home to hook it up for testing, I wondered if he was some kind of lunatic because this sub's speaker cables were massive, larger than my amp's 4G power cable. A closer look at this sub's 'speaker cable' labels indicated they were in fact 2G power cables! Plus the wire strands were silver, and I thought copper only came in brown.

Anyway I was wondering if having excess wire in your cable is in fact a bad thing, because at some point, is there a threshold crossed where you start getting more resistance than conductivity because the cables are far bigger than they need to be?

No. Larger wires will ALWAYS have less resistance. There are simply limits of practicality. You're not gaining anything from running huge wires to your little xplod.

 

[R34P3R 10+ year member]

No. Larger wires will ALWAYS have less resistance. There are simply limits of practicality. You're not gaining anything from running huge wires to your little xplod.

Well theres that and I don't think you'll find a suitable amp for that sub that will actually take 2 gauge speaker wire...

 

[hispls 5,000+ posts]

If the wire is "silver" colored it's probably aluminum

 

[trumpet 5,000+ posts]

Tinned copper appears silver. You can check by rubbing the edge of a razor blade along the length of the strands and see if it turns copper. The guy was a moron for running such large power cable to his subwoofer. You could probably get away with 16 gauge speaker wire at that power level.

 

[jolly_26 10+ year member]

being that he was running an Xplod in the first place, he was probably running power cable to his sub and speaker cable to power his amp haha

 

[OmegaBunny 10+ year member]

He probably had the sub hooked directly to his battery to maximize DBeez!