Hey guys, I have an amp and speakers on the way and I was just wondering if you're meant to keep the speaker wires separate from the power, where is the speaker wire meant to be routed for the side that has the power wire?
I have a Vx commy if that helps.
Inductive pick (cross talk or mutual coupling) may be an issue in modern cars where the ideal way to avoid such is to twist the +ve and -ve wires from each speaker together in what is called a twisted pair. (If you are familiar with an Ethernet cable, you’ll understand what twisted pairs are).
Obviously twisted pair speaker cables can be made manually from individual wires or you can buy twisted pair speaker cables (for silly money at posh audio places). You can then lay these twisted pairs next to an existing loom without any real worry about inductive pickup up..
The other issue is that using the lowest gauge speaker wire provides the lowest resistance which improves speaker performance. That’s because as wire gauge goes down, wire thickness goes up and resistance goes down. As the wire resistance is also dependant on the cable length, choice is limited by the cable length, the practical space available for the cable run and your budget. However, as cable lengths are short in a vehicle environment, the difference between thin and thick speaker wires makes no practical difference. So using 10 gauge cables in a car is just plain dumb
Having said that, all cars I’ve owned had thin parallel bundled wires next to power wires with no appreciable issues, and good sound. So as Shane said you should be ok having speaker wires next to power wires.
The limiting factor in sound quality is primarily the head unit and speakers in any case, not the wires...
Where wire problems can occur is if you have noise on the dc power lines, from for example a noisy alternator that doesn’t have any filtering running next to untwisted speaker cables. Such noise may be picked up by speaker wires or interconnect wires (between head unit and amp) and thus be heard as buzor hum. Such inductive pick up may also be more of an issue in modern cars with their high speed data busses scattered around the vehicle. Oddly enough, it isn’t a problem in modern cars either because these data busses are carried on twisted pair (iirc).
Speaker wire isn’t the only concern as the bigger issue tends to be if the amp is connected to the head unit via unshielded parallel cables carrying line level signals. This isn’t ideal and using either twisted pair or coax to carry the line level signals to your amp is much preferred.
So it’s your choice how far you go to reduce inductive pickup which may or may not be an issue on your speaker wires...
