Surround Wire Lengths

[maze446]

I just bought my VT-12 system and I am pretty pumped. The one question I have is about the length of speaker wire I should uun to each surround speaker. A person once told me that when wiring the surround speakers, the wire length should be the same for both speakers, i.e., if you have 40' of wire running to the L surround, you should use 40' of wire to you R surround even if the R surround is shorter than a 40' run. Is there any truth to this? I am a little skeptical since you can adjust individual speaker volume (at least on my receiver) to compensate for the relativly minimal power loss to the surround speaker with the longer run.

[cschang]

the length of wire makes no audible difference as far as delay is concerned until you get into the thousands of feet.

As for speaker volume, at runs of 40', using 12ga wire....you should have no issues.

[wsmithjr]

I had the same question just a couple of days ago. Here's a link I found: http://home.att.net/~rfowkes/WireLengthTimeDelay.html. It's kind of scary that I read that I should keep the wires the same length in my HK receiver user manual. Makes you wonder.

Warren

[maze446]

Thanks a lot for the info. That link is a great explanation by the way and yes, a salesperson was the one who told me that the wire should be all the same lengths. He almost got me!!

[Retread]

Thanks a lot for the info. That link is a great explanation by the way and yes, a salesperson was the one who told me that the wire should be all the same lengths. He almost got me!!

Electricity (which is what carries audio) runs at just under the speed of light, which is about 186,000 miles per second. I don't think propagation delay for length of wire is an issue.

What could be an issue is the losses in the copper. If your copper cross-section is too small, you can get resistance losses in the speaker cables, which would vary with cable length. However, you'd have to be using fairly skinny cables for this to be an issue. As was stated elsewhere, differences in volume that might result from differences in length can be compensated. What could be a problem is that resistance in the cables represents damping in the speaker path, which you probably don't want. Again the kinds of differences in length we are talking about probably wouldn't affect the damping, unless you are using REALLY skinny cables. On another thread, Sasha suggested 16 Guage for very short distances, 14 Guage for medium distances, and 12 Guage for long distances. At these guages, differences in length won't matter.

Just one more urban myth of the audio world.