Home Theater

Can I splice 18 gauge speaker wire to 12 gauge wire?

Dec 08, 2008 by Jasmyn | Posted in Home Theater

I bought the wrong speaker wire, I bought 18-gauge. I realized the wire on my existing speakers is smaller than that. I wanted to splice the wires together to make them longer. Can I splice the two types or do I have to use the same size?

Yes you can. And more than likely you'll never hear the difference. Unless you're running amazing equipment and/or a lot of wattage.

BUT, wire is cheap! Splicing speaker wire is strictly amateur hour. Why not just go buy the correct

18 Gauge Cable + 2 Conductor speaker wire Tappan

This is the our most commonly sold audio/red+black cable. Mostly used for security camera power and for speaker and paging applications. Order Online.

Matching Amps to Subs and Speakers

Question : Is it best to only hook up one sub per channel? If so, does hooking two subs to one channel reduce the power each one gets? To get into specifics, if you're running four JL Audio 12w6v2's, should you have amp on each or is it possible to get away with a one or two on the four? There's also the problem of wiring them if you use something other than JL Audio amps. What about using, say, one PrecisionPower PCX-4125 which bridged puts out 500x2 at 4 ohms. Would this be a good idea as far as quality and will this lead the amp to an early grave? Derek Lee : An amplifier sees whatever is connected to its speaker terminals as one item. For instance, if you connect a pair of 4-ohm speakers in parallel, the amplifier thinks it is connected to a single 2-ohm speaker. If you connect a bunch of different speakers all with different impedances in a variety of series and parallel circuits, the amp still only sees a single, very weird speaker. So in a sense, whatever you connect to an amplifier, it appears as one sub. The concept of "one amp per sub" is in better context when used as a rule to gain the maximum power. This approach is common among high-power competitors, since they can drive huge amounts of power into each voice coli. For general listening use, the difference between one good amp and several smaller amps that add up to the same power is debatable. My rule is this: If I can connect the voice coils to net out at the optimum target impedance of the amplifier,...

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