Speaker wire and Gauge
 

Are all speaker wires created equal. Where to buy? knuconceptz or cheap ebay/amazon?

What gauge to use for:

Subwoofer?

Tower speakers?

In-boats?

I used 12 ga. For tower and sub and 16 for in boats. Get your wire from chino tony in San Jose lol!shot out to him

Monoprice.com is a good place to get wire. I run there 12guage

http://www.monoprice.com/products/se...eyword=speaker wire

I own an Electroncis company and in my experience, I could never hear the difference between 12 gauge "Moster" speaker wire and 12 gauge Generic Speaker wire. I highly highly doubt you will either. The more expensive wire might look nicer, have a thicker coating or be more flexible but will it sound better? Not in my opinion.

RCA's are a little different, you want to stay clear of the "dollar Store" brands. Use good quality RCA's.

Speaking of which, I am surprised that in this day and age, there isn't a better standard of connecting amps and decks than analog RCA cables. I have personally beening installing systems for 20 years. I would have though by now a CAT5 cable carrying a full digital signal from deck to the amp would be the standard.

What gauge should I use for sub, towers, etc?

How much power are you running? 12 guage will run pretty much anything you need. I wouldn't go much smaller than 16 guage though. Somewhere in the middle of 12-16 guage should be fine.

800W 4 channel amp.

bridged channel for sub SVC(300W rms 600W peek - 4 ohms

other channel for tower speakers - 125 watts each rated power handling - 300W peak - 4 ohms

the four conductor monoprice in-wall speaker wire is awesome because it's sheathed and keeps the wires together. I use it almost exclusively for speaker runs in the boat. In fact, I've used it for power cable too, tying two conductors together for each of power and ground where 10awg or so is called for (like ballast pumps). 2x12awg = same surface area as 9 awg.

If you were concerned about power loss over a long span or if you wanted to compare wire gauge output, you could use a dmm to measure AC output voltage at the amp and again at the speaker terminal to test voltage loss of a wire gauge over a span.

Is it ok to us 16 on all 3 speakers?

16 would be fine for your tower speakers. I'd use 12 or 14 for the sub though. If you're running speaker wire anyway, just run 12 guage everywhere so you can just forget about it and never run a speaker wire again. It's cheap on amazon... like 20 bucks for 100ft of it.