Philips Spooled Speaker Wire - 100ft - 16 gauge

List Price: $20.99 Discount Price: $19.35

Features:

• Oxygen-free copper, 16 gauge

Customer Reviews:

really cheap but they sound great [Posted on 2008-07-22]
I don't know a ton about audio but I can def. tell a difference in the audio quality. I have a 7.1 onkyo reciever and everything sounds so crisp and I'm more than happy with my purchase

Buy at your Local Lowes store [Posted on 2008-07-22]
After checking the price and shipping cost of this product on amazon, I decided to pay a visit to my local Lowes store. Here is what I found out:
Amazon: $16.77+$11 for standard shipping (just one above the super slow shipping)

Lowes: $20 + 1.50 tax.

Don't get ripped off by marketing tactics. This is great wire! [Posted on 2008-07-24]
This is decent quality 16 gauge speaker wire. It works fine for all but the highest end systems. It is so sad that companies like Monster Cable have everyone fooled into thinking you need to buy special wire to hook up speakers. 99.999% of people can't tell the difference in sound quality with most speakers, and you probably won't either. use that extra $100 and buy a better receiver or speakers if you have money to burn. That is where the real sound quality is anyway.

hard to distinguish the 2 strands [Posted on 2008-08-06]
They strip easily and the sound quality is fine. My only gripe is it's very hard to distinguish between the two strands. There's a very faint white line on one of the strands. The surface is very reflective and the it's hard to seperate the white line from a light reflection. The manufacturer should put a black line on one of the strands or use different colored wire or insulation like other manufacturers.

No excuse for indistinguishable strands. [Posted on 2008-08-27]
Speaker wires come with two strands. The strand going to the + or - pole on the receiver MUST go to the same pole (+ or -) on the speaker, which means that you MUST be able to identify each strand at each end. This is the way speaker wiring has worked for well over 50 years (since the inception of stereo).

So how on earth can a company be lazy/stupid/careless/sloppy enough to market a 100' long spool of "speaker wire" with no way of distinguishing the two strands at each end? That's what I got when I ordered this product. The picture on the spool I received actually shows the two strands as being different colors - one dark and one light - but they were not.

If you do not happen to own an Ohm meter, you must first cut the wire to length, split the strands into two at each end, wrap one wire/strand with tape, then manually track that strand all the way (as much as 100') to the other end and mark it with tape so that you can be sure of connecting your speakers in phase (assuming you didn't miss a twist in the wire somewhere along the line).

Since the quality of wire has to be pretty much the same in different brands' plain rolls of basic 16-guage speaker wire, I have to downgrade this to 1 star for this inexcusable omission. I agree with the person who said to buy from Home Depot or Lowes so that you can see what you are getting.

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