The best way to connect speakers in a home theater is to use speaker wire. Speaker wire is the type of wire used to make an electrical connection from an audio amplifier to the speakers. The wire is made up of two strands of conductors which are insulated by either Teflon, PVC, or PE.
The first step in determining the best speaker wire for you is to determine the appropriate wire gauge needed to transmit the audio signal. The gauge or AWG of the wire is simply the thickness of the wire. The tricky part of understanding wire gauge is knowing that the lower the number, the thicker the wire is. There Are Many Different Wire Gauges available for speaker wire on the market that can suit your needs. There is also speaker wire that is designed to be ran in the wall which is a must if you are running the wire behind a wall.
While browsing for speaker wire online you will notice that there is 18AWG, 16AWG, 14AWG, and 12AWG. The distance you are running your speaker wire will determine how thick the wire needs to be to deliver crystal clear audio with minimal interference. For any additional length the signal needs to travel the result is more power loss and more resistance. It is best to keep the runs as short as you can to minimize the amount of resistance.
I recommend 16 AWG wire for runs up to 90 feet or less. For runs between 90 and 200 feet use 14 gauge wire for the best performance. For runs longer than 200 feet you will definitely want to use 12 gauge speaker wire. If you really don’t care to think about the approrpiate gauge per the length then you can just play it safe and get 12 gauge speaker wire no matter what the distance of the run is.
There is an endless amount of options of where you can locate the speakers. You can run speaker wire in the walls to avoid any external exposure and weathering to the wire. A lot of speaker wire can even be buried in the ground in tubing which is great for many ideas. For example, you can run the wire out to your backyard next to the fire pit for music.
There are a few simple ways to figure out how much wire you need to buy. My favorite method is to run a string to each location between the receiver and where the speaker will be installed to get a good estimate. You will need to run the string exactly how you intend to run the speaker wire so be sure to go over the door frames and corners just how you would for the real installation. Allow some slack for the extra flexibility and to avoid sharp bends in the wire which can have a negative impact on performance.
The absolute most important aspect of speaker wire is resistance. A low resistance speaker wire will allow the amps power to send as much power through the wire to the speakers voice coil as possible. The shorter the wire is the lower the resistance on the line will be. Depending on how well the listener can hear, the resistance can have a noticeable affect if it exceeds five percent of the impedance of the speaker.
What You Should Look For In Speaker Wire 