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Monster v. Home Depot


KWTX

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16 or 14 gauge will be fine.

there are two camps regarding speaker wire - some would only use monster - and others (like me) dont really care for it - as long as its copper and has good insulation, a same gauge wire will perform up to par with its monster cable counterpart.

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On 8/2/2003 3:19:05 AM pinipig523 wrote:

there are two camps regarding speaker wire - some would only use monster - and others (like me) dont really care for it...

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There's also the camp that swears against monster, but goes into brands such as PS audio or anaconda, which are, what, anywhere from $1000 to severl thousand per pair of cabling.

I personally use monster. i'll admit it aint worth what they charge, but it sure as hell is better than home depot.

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use a minimum 14, but if you go through the expense of purchasing 7's go with bigger cables. electrically speaking the bigger the wire the less resistance to signal it represents, you will be passing quite a large range of frequencies thhrough the wire, and being an electrician, i would never use 16 or smaller on my speaks, and if you go with other than name brand cable do be sure that you try to get some idea of cable composition, many of the cheaper cable that are spoken of out there are merely copper coated anything, and have poor conductivity. i just dont see why a person might want to cut corners on this very important link in audio12.gif

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I am certainly not a cable nut, but I think it is wise to stick with 12 gauge if you are running 15 feet or more. As for Monster vs. Home Depot, I live on the southern CT coast; during the summer, we have the house opened up most of the time and deal with a good amount of humidity. I have Monster and Home Depot cables that I have employed over last 14 years, with Original Monster Cable being the oldest. The OMC looks and feels brand new. The Home Depot cables (much newer) seem to show signs of degradation. The insulation gets tacky and the copper seems to be changing color (oxidation?). Their performance is identical as far as I can tell.

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To be glib: I think you can safely assume this all nonsense.

But people are devoted to wire gauge and the like. I try not to get up on a high soap box until the nonsense starts costing people a lot of money.

I was at West Marine to buy some paint and saw they have something which looks like stranded Romex. This might be a good candidate for the new super wire. No, I don't condone it by any means.

I just don't get it. You can buy better speakers, hopefully from Klipsch, which have measureable improvements. Buy a sub, go nuts. Yet folks worry about wire where no one can find 0.1 dB of improvement. Yet this is presented as the Holy Grail.

Grrr.

Gil

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William---As you well know many audiophiles are twits. Note that this wire thing only started in the 1970s when the Baby Boomers came into money; the most delusional, smug, self-centered and irrational generation in American history.

Lacking the cynicism and hard-knock experience of earlier generations, and with their minds addled by acid-eating and coke snorting they fell easy prey to the conmen of the new wire "industry".

Many are perfect marks, they refuse to believe they've been conned even after the con is blown. A grifter's dream.

Note that the old time audiophiles, many of whom had argueabley better gear than most use today and were much more worldly and experienced than those that followed (having been through The Great Depression AND WW II) didn't hear differences in wire except when wires were simply incapable of physically passing the signal correctly.

If 2 competant wires sound different we have to ask ourselves why Wente, Thuras, Olson, Fletcher, Hilliard, Lansing and Klipsch never noticed it.

Of course it's possible to design a wire to have a sound but such a wire will be inherantly inaccurate; it will be affecting the signal and not merely passing it.

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Check out www.venhaus1.com/diycatfivecable.html. Be warned, this takes a long time (I was laid up after a car accident) but well worth the effort IMHO. Also TNTaudio has some less time consuming projects and they sound great as well. Save some money, these are at least the equal of any Monster product. Plus you did it yourself, and that is always a good feeling.

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On 8/2/2003 7:05:32 AM arthurs wrote:

There's also a camp (okay, maybe just me) that says look into cobaltcable.com. Tremendous cable, less than Monster, great service and guarantees.

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At $60 for 6-meters of speaker wire, I would not call the cobalt stuff cheaper Monster Cable!

Here is all you really need:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/pshowdetl.cfm?&DID=7&Partnumber=100-150

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Lets be logical and practical....And I have seen it get so far out of control.

Rule 1. The cost of your interconnects and speaker wire should NEVER exceed the cost of your electronics....Ahhhh so you say, that's a no brainer... Well there's a flock of misguided out there that are buying HTIB for $800 and connecting it with $1000 worth of monster... The latest Yuppie line is no longer..."Come see my Etchings", it is now "Check Out My Monster Cable" Muhahaha.

Rule 2: There are the few, the proud, that claim that they can hear the difference in quality of cables and interconnects....the rest of us just need to make sure that we have good, solid, un-chewed connections.

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I have used the twisted Cat5 cable for rear surrounds and they sound great in runs of about 35ft each.

I recently was looking for some 12ga. wire and stumbled across some outdoor lighting wire, you guesses it, 12ga.

The stuff sounds just like the MonsterZ's in the HT!

The 100ft run cost me all of $17.50.

Coat hangers or lamp cord are hard to find sometimes.

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