Home Theater Hacks

Hack #45. Use the Same Speaker Wire Lengths (Not!)

As long as the length of wire connecting your various speakers is fairly similar, you'll get great results and sound, without interference or adverse delays.

One of the more popular home theater myths going around today is that the length of speaker wire connecting your receiver or amplifier to your speakers must be identical, especially for rear and surround speakers. The prevailing thought is that a longer wire introduces additional delay in transmitting sound, resulting in an uneven production of audio between two speakers (left and right). Although this sounds good (and probably will make your friends think you're really smart when you dispense this as advice), it's absolute nonsense, at least outside of a laboratory.

We did a calculation to try and determine how much speaker wire it would take to get a 1% phase shift (time delay) between the left and right speakers. These calculations demonstrated you needed a difference of about 80 feet of speaker wire before this would happen; keep in mind that most home theaters use between 80 and 100 feet of speaker wire for the entire room!

Tip

It's also worth keeping in mind that this test assumes you could actually hear a 1% phase shift in sound. That's a highly suspect assumption, even in audiophile situations.

At the same time, this isn't an admonition to cut your speaker wire to the absolute shortest length, either. If you are installing a new speaker system, cut your wires to length, ...