Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsSurprisingly Good Speaker Cable
Reviewed in Canada on April 28, 2019
I was a little apprehensive purchasing this private labelled speaker cable, most of my experiences with Amazon private label products has been pretty good however there have been a couple Amazon Basics products which just didn't meet my expectations .... fortunately this speaker cable is Surprisingly Good and a great value considering the price.
First off I'm a systems integrator and the price of this cable is almost the same price as I pay from my wholesale distributor so hands down you can't beat the price especially with Free Prime Shipping.
I purchased the 200ft, 14 gauge roll. The cable is covered in a white PVC jacket with handy measurement markings at every foot. The measurement markings let me know the length of my cable runs and also tell me how much wire is left on the spool. I use a Cyclops Wire Stripper (Jonard Industries ... available on Amazon) and had no issue stripping the outer PVC jacket without cutting the pair of wires inside. If you don't want to pay $30 for the Cyclops wire stripper the Westonetek Universal Cable Stripper (also available on Amazon) does a good job too and is half the price. There is a nylon tracer or stripping string inside the cable, so if you prefer to cut a small portion of the PVC jacket away you can then use the stripped string inside the cover to cut and peel the outer jacket off without knicking the wires inside.
The internal wires are color coded Red and Black. I use a pair of Klien wire strippers to strip the PVC covering off the internal wires. Once again no issue stripping the internal black and red wires.
Strand Count: Amazon does not provide a Strand Count for this wire so I cannot tell you what it is. For reference Name brand Speaker wire that I normally use has a Strand Count of 105. I've also used speaker wire with a strand count of 250. The higher the strand count the more flexible the wire will be. Based on comparisons to my other speaker wire I would estimate the Strand Count of this Amazon Basics 14 gauge wire to be 100. The cable is flexible enough for in wall installation and should lie flat when running it on the ground.
Overall I'm very pleased with the sound quality, price and performance of this speaker cable. Not all AmazonBasics products are winners but this speaker wire certainly is ... I would recommend it and purchase it again.