Ok so, I've got a 0 gauge run of wire going from my bat to my amp, and then another 0 gauge run for grounds. This makes sense to me as the amp is drawing a lot of power over a long distance, so we don't want voltage drop and we don't want to set the wire on fire by overloading it.

So why am I running 16? gauge speaker wire from my amp to my subs thats ~2-3 feet long when I'm pushing 500+W RMS. Would I also not experience voltage drop/power loss with such thin wire?

 

You've just discovered the "flip side of the coin"......it's the short length that makes it work. If you up the power to 1KW or more you might want to throw some 14 or 12ga in........

HTH

 

Using ohm law, at 12V to have 700w(500W amp & efficiency loss) going tru the wire will lead to a ~58A draw. The output of the amp when you reach 500w with a 2ohm load should give a voltage of ~32V and ~16A

The less the load is resistive, the more amps it will need, the same 500w but with a 1 ohm load would lead to ~22V and ~22A

Let also do another example based on you sig, you have 900w on tap and a load of 1ohm, this will lead to 30V and 30A going from the amp to the subs, the 16g should still be able to handle the 30A on a 2-3 feet distance.

make sense?

 

Wow, look at you all technical and stuff....

Happy Friday.....oops, Saturday now.....

 

Makes perfect sense. Next question is, how are we determining the voltage/amperage on the output? Why do we have 32V@2Ohm and 22V @ 1 Ohm? Are we doing I/R=V?

And since the voltage is higher, we don't need as large of a wire?

 

actually if you use the speaker wire calculator on bcae, 16 awg is not ok for 500watts @ 4ohms even at 2-3 feet...circular mils/amp is below 300 which means the wire can over heat if played long enough at that level. You need at least 14 awg at 4ohms, and larger if at 2 ohms or lower...even 12 awg is below specs at 1 ohm! Here's the link: scroll down to #16 "wire" it's the first calculator.

http://www.bcae1.com/

 

i just use 8AWG power wire for my sub woofer.

 

That was going to be my next question, is there any issue to just using power wire?
As long as it's a higher quality cable with a high strand count, is there any problem to doing this?

I think I read somewhere that low strand count wire can cause issues where you don't get the full spectrum of sound, but as long as the strand count is high and I'm only playing 25-50hz so I think I should be just fine to use 10 gauge power wire.

 

copper is copper..power wire is just bigger speaker wire.