Speaker Cables

Speaker cables make an amazing difference to your hifi system's sound, and like most things in the world,  the more you spend, the greater the sonic benefits. We offer both single and bi-wire speaker cables to enable you to get the most from your hi-fi amplifier or av receiver and speakers. Speaker cables are usually round cross section, but we sell flat speaker cable designed to discretely run under carpet or laminate floors, ideal for rear surround speakers in a home cinema system.

The most common form of speaker cable is a twin core or single wired type, with stranded copper conductors insulated with a PVC, polyethelyne or PTFE insulation. An outer protective jacket protects the cable from mechanical wear and tear. Speaker cables all sound quite different to each other due to the different approaches in manufacture, which results in variation in resistance, capacitance and inductance, thereby altering the final sound quality. The polarity of a loudpspeaker is very important - you must always connect the red terminal of the amplifier output to the red terminal of the corresponding loudspeaker, and the same for the black terminals - red to red, black to black. This is to ensure that both stereo speakers work 'in phase' and help each other, rather than 'out of phase', partially cancelling each other's sound output. A Tip - if your system sounds diffused with no stereo image and weak bass, the likely culprit is that your speakers are wired out of phase.

A four core speaker cable is known as a bi-wire speaker cable, and it can be terminated 2 to 4 to bi-wire your speakers, or 4 to 4 to bi-amp your speeakers - do not to forget to remove the shorting links between the bass and treble drivers when doing this!

Many high end speaker cables employ different construction techniques and more expensive materials in their design and manufacture. Examples would be to include a braid screen along the length of the insulation to protect the audio signals from electromagnetic radiation and induced currents, and also the use of silver plated copper conductors for lower resistance.

We recommend to all customers to have their speaker cables properly terminated with 4mm banana plugs - it reduces the likelyhood of accidently shorting the output of your hifi amplifier or AV receiver, and is a therefore a good investment long term.