I've read or heard somewhere that for proper sound speaker wires from your headunit to the speakers should be the same length. Is this true? It sure would be nice to shorten one a little as it would "clean up" the wiring under the dash. TIA Pete

I did high-end Car-Fi for about 10 years back in the '80's. Dealt with every type of "audiophile" known to man, and several known to inter-stellar aliens.

I'm sure that if you hang a 'scope on the output leads, and compare one to the other you'd see a slight difference, or did tests in lab conditions. To be able to hear a difference you'd need to be the "bionic woman", or the guy in the stereo store that can hear his neighbor's grass growing at 2:00am.

The distances in a car aren't long enough for this to happen.

Years ago I listened to a lecture by Adm. Grace Hopper who told a story about her search for the mythical "nano" second. For those that may not know computer geeks spend a lot of time talking about how many nano seconds it takes to turn a signal on and off. Nobody could really tell her how long a nano second was.

Finally some wire was recycled from a telephone system update and cut into pieces just under 12" long. These pieces of wire represent how far electricity can flow in one nano second, which according to the booklet I have from Radio Shack is 0.000000001 of a second.

So if you have an extra 10' of speaker wire, which is quite doubtful, you would be delaying the signal 0.00000001 seconds. If you can hear that my hat is way off to you :)

My wife tells me I'm hard of hearing all the time, so I guess I'm going to have to make sure those wire lenghts are precisely the same length, huh? I wouldn't want to miss anything now would I? Watch out wires here come the cutters! Thanks for the replies. Pete

It's far more important to look what's going on at the ends of those those wires. The best wire:) + lousy connections :( = lousy audio:( .
-Bill

Just be sure not to let any of the smoke in the wires out!