Wire Gauge for Speakers.

[Grant Bunter]

The shortest length of cable to get to where you are going. If you have to go more than about 50 feet, you should consider having an amp rack on each side of the stage.

+1
Makes more sense when signal cables can be run out to much longer distances too...

[NukePooch]

+1 on Neutrik connector line...especially the NL2FX Connectors.

+1 on the 'Talent' 12ga bulk speaker wire. All my cables are this. The Talent cable is ok, but their LED PAR lights sucked...My old pastor 'hit a deal' and bought 8. Had to take a few back for being DOA (1 dead, 1 didn't respond to DMX, 1 had no green). One of the replacements was DOA, then one more died after a dozen hours...but they were still better than the "Rockville" smoke machines he got from Amazon.

I do have 1 100' speaker cable. Used it twice for running low-volume sound to cover most of a soccer field for an Easter egg hunt. Not worth it. I picked up a couple F-F Speakon adaptors which would have done the same thing with a couple 50' cords (and, more importantly, can be used to extend ALL lengths of speaker cables). It's on my list to split the 100' Speakon cable in half...though the list might be finished right around the time I get my third set of teeth.

[Seth]

Nor should you. Even if the resistance losses are tolerable with that much length capacitance and inductance both will result in significant high frequency losses.

What's a reasonable maximum length?

The shortest length of cable to get to where you are going. If you have to go more than about 50 feet, you should consider having an amp rack on each side of the stage.

Allow me to rephrase. At what length would capacitance and inductance result in noticeable and unreasonable high frequency losses.

And a follow up on that... when daisy-chaining lows and highs on 4 conductor cabling, sounds like it may make more sense to route to the subs after the tops. No?

[Seth]

I don't now or have ever owned a 100 foot speaker cable....

Nor should you. Even if the resistance losses are tolerable with that much length capacitance and inductance both will result in significant high frequency losses.

Bill,
Purely out of curiosity and the sake of learning yet another valuable tid-bit of audio knowledge here...
At what length would capacitance and inductance result in high frequency losses significant enough to be noticeable and unreasonable?
Are the losses that would occur something that could be made up for with EQ?

[Seth]

Here's what I've been able to dig up; Based on 12awg speaker wire and a capacitance of 15.24pF per Ft (standard value in the calculator I found), high frequency rolloff will be down 3dB at the following frequences & lengths.

50' -3dB @ 25,601.14Hz
60' -3dB @ 21,251.75Hz
63.66' -3dB @ 20,001.6Hz
70' -3dB @ 18,145.59Hz
75' -3dB @ 16,903.31Hz
100' -3dB @ 12,556.74Hz

Interesting.