Question about speaker wire?

[Hdale85]

I was going to order some speaker wire from PE and was just thinking...How much does the guage of the wire matter? I was going to buy some of their 10ga OFC wire is that a lot of overkill? Would 12ga be just as good? Just thought I would ask before I purchase.

[warnerwh]

For runs under 50 feet 12 guage is fine.

[Chris7]

10 ga is very large and almost certainly unnecessary. The variable that's primarily affected by gauge is resistance. To find out what gauge you need, determine the wire resistance per foot, multiply that by how long your cable run is, then divide your speaker's nominal impedance by that number. That give you the maximum damping factor when using those cables. As long as it's above 50 or so, you're golden. As an example, with Canare 4S11 (11 gauge), that works out to about 62 feet.