What is the best wire gauge for rewiring speaker cabinets?

[JPJ]

As the title says, what is the best wire gauge and type for rewiring speaker cabinets. In the past, I've been told just to use 13 amp electrical cable but is this really the best or is there something better?

[chris_b]

I'd use the stuff OBBM uses in his speaker cables.

[flyfisher]

Yep, that would be a good start, though for the very short distance between the socket and speaker it's probably not too critical and 13A mains cable would probably be fine as a lower limit (assuming we're not talking multi-kW cabs!)

Since the OP mentioned re-wiring a cab, the existing wiring would be a good guide. Bigger is OK, smaller is not.

Also, don't use solid cable. The constant vibration could cause 'work-hardening' of the copper, leading to breakage of the cable.

[Phil Starr]

You don't need to worry too much though avoid extremes. 400w into 8ohms is about 7amps current and 400W is a lot for a single driver especially as in practice this is a peak value. I'd use a wire that would carry at least this though which means 1 sq mm. [url="http://www.diynot.com/pages/el/el003.php"]http://www.diynot.com/pages/el/el003.php[/url] most speaker cables are 1.5 so you might want to keep the same cable throughout the chain.

You don't need to worry about resistance with such short pieces of wire, or heating effects as the heating of the coil in the speaker itself will be much more significant.

Don't go too big either, at one point I used 79/02 speaker cable and it ended up breaking off the solder tags because of the weight and rigidity, With any speaker wires it is a good idea to fix them to the speaker frame to stop them moving around too much and to avoid rattles.

Don't worry about oxygen free or any other muck and magic specialist speaker cables either, if they are any better it is only because they are better made. 13A mains cable is fine but strip out the wires from the overall cable and use single wires as this lightens the wires and increases their flexibility.

[JPJ]

Cheers gents, I'm planning on tidying up the wiring in my Schroeder 21012 which is 1100w at 8 ohms but as its wired as a series pair of 10's in parallel with the 12 I guess 13amp cable will be fine :-)

[rmorris]

Bit late to this but agreeing wit the gist of the thread. Cable around 1sq mm is plenty. In cable spec terms that's equivalent to 18 AWG or 32/0.2 cable ( ie 32 strands of 0.2 mm diameter wire ).
It's also available in other strand / diameter configurations but 32/0.2 is readily available and offers good flexibility. Larger diameters do no harm but if using solder ( as opposed to push on tag etc ) connections you need to be sure soldering iron is nice and hot enough to ensure a good joint as more copper draws more heat away from the joint itself meaning the joint can become a weak point.
And as mentioned it's a good idea to fix the cables.