[William D. Lester]

In upgrading a sound system after about 25 years of listening to old equipment, I have purchased a Bryston B135 integrated amp and am driving a pair of Elac FS 248 speakers. The problem, so I am told, is with the length of cable to my farthest speaker. It is 75 feet running through walls and floor joist spaces. There is no other way. Presently the cable is 14 awg shielded, twisted pair copper. The system sounds good to me but am told by people who know a lot more than I do and by dealers that this is a bad thing. So I would like to do what I can within reason to make the best of this. I have one opinion that a good step is to increase the wire size to an effective 9 awg - done by combining 2 x 12 awg wires in a 4 conductor cable. I'm told this will be a more significant improvement than worrying about wire types. Others tell me that this is pointless considering the length of cable. I have had 1 dealer tell me that the Bryston speaker cable is good, professional quality studio grade cable, but not the best audio cable. He is suggesting that  I invest in about $7000.00 worth of Audioquest cable with a 72volt charge on the outer part of the cable. I can't afford that, nor do I want to overly complicate what seemed like a fairly simple system. I am not an 'audiophile' - just a music lover who wants to listen to decent sounding equipment. I don't mind spending a couple of thousand, as long as I can actually hear an improvement to justify the expense. I am looking to this forum for advice as I am not sure of how I might proceed.

[richidoo]

The "correct way" to handle this would be to run a balanced line signal to a remote amplifier. That would minimize losses and noise. But you would need balanced preamp and balanced amplifier, or balanced / SE conversion methods at each end.

But since you like the way it sounds now, stick with it.

The disadvantage to running long speaker cables is the high resistance will ruin the amps ability to control the speaker. A Bryston amp due to the high feedback has extremely low output impedance which means "grip" on the speaker, for good detail and bass slam. The resistance from the speaker cable is added to the amp's output impedance which makes the output impedance much higher and the grip on the speakers is reduced.

Putting it in context, the resistance of 14ga stranded copper wire is about 2.5 ohms /1000ft. That is .19 ohms per 75 feet. Multiply x 2 for the return wire and you have .4 ohms added to the amp's .01 or less, call it .45 ohms output impedance. That's still lower than ANY high end, high power tube amp with 8 feet of any speaker cable.

If you wanted to go crazy, you could upgrade to 10ga stranded wire would get you down to 1ohm/1000 or .15ohms. Some solid state amplifiers with minimal feedback have higher output impedance than that and they are well loved.
Rich

[Chicago]

William,
I also have long speaker wire runs of maybe 40' and I run a Bryston amp & pre to B&W 803D speakers.  I was concerned about the length of the run and I spent a fair amount of time investigating it and it became a fairly esoteric discussion.  Clearly there is more resistance over a longer run but I concluded if I couldn't hear it didn't really matter to me.  There are folks here with far more technical expertise that can address these issues. 

I went with Bryston speaker wires and I have been very happy with them.  They use a high quality 12 AWG wire with high quality connectors and they are very reasonably priced compared to most high end speaker wires.  Because you are running these through your floor and floor joists I would order the wires bare ended at the amp end so you don't have to cut huge holes in the baseboard, floor or joists.  Bryston fills the banana with solder so you can't remove them and then reuse them.  I ordered banana's at both ends and I had to cut off the plugs at the amp end to avoid large holes to accommodate the plugs.  Bryston offers bi-wire configuration at the same cost, if you want to go this route (you need to pay for the additional connectors).  You could order spades or banana plugs and attach them at the amp end yourself after you make the run.  The bare wire seems to be working well and it has been connected for over a year.  I guess I could get some oxidation but I can always cut off another couple of inches and reconnect the wires.

https://store.bryston.com/speaker-cable.html

Good listening,
Mike 

[William D. Lester]

Thanks for both the responses. Based on them, I have ordered Bryston 9awg speaker cables with spade connectors on both ends. I have installed 2 runs of 3/4" pvc conduit through the difficult areas. Since the cable is 10mm in diameter, the 2 won't fit in the same conduit.

[William D. Lester]

Forgot to mention. Bryston was good enough to send a sample of the cable with spades on one end and bananas on the other. My local Windsor dealer will keep this but it is a good selling tool. Bryston has been great to deal with.