I found this on The Gear Page
The Gear Page and thought it would be worth pointing out. I use heavy duty Monster Cable to connect to speakers, which is overkill I know.
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Craig Walker:
In terms a ordinary Joe can understand, what's the differences in speaker cables vs. guitar cables?
For instances, I know it's bad to use guitar cables on PA speakers, mixing board, etc. Why??
Also, use a speaker cable between a head and cabinet, right? Not a guitar cable? But you use guitar cables between pedals, but once it gets to the head, then you go to speaker cables......
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Vaughn
Guitar cables are designed to carry very low current and thus tend to have very thin conductors. A guitar cable doesen't work well as a speaker cable because at higher speaker currents they are very lossy and the center conductor can actually melt if pushed hard enough. And, in a guitar cable, the internal resistance can be high enough that the an amp's output stage thinks it's looking into a higher impedence load, which can create other problems. Unlike speaker cables, guitar cables are shielded to prevent outside intereference from getting into your amp. Also, while guitar cables could be used in patching PA gear together, just don't use them for any speaker connections.
Speaker cables are designed to carry the higher current needed to drive a speaker and thus have thicker conductors. Also, they are typically unshielded so they wouldn't work very well as a guitar cord....unless you like lot's of noise.
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John Phillips
Two fundamentally different types of system.
Guitar cables are 'signal cables' and only have to handle very tiny currents, and must be shielded to prevent noise getting into the system. All the cables between the guitar and the amp, including any between effects and any in the amp's effects loop, need to be this type.
Speaker cables are 'power cables' and need to handle large currents, but don't need shielding.
You can't safely use a guitar cable for a speaker cable, because the fine conductors in this type of cable won't be able to stand the high currents and may simply melt - or damage the insulation and short out. There is also a risk to the amp even if the cable survives - because a shielded cable has quite a lot of internal capacitance, it can interfere with the correct loading of the amp.
You can safely use a speaker cable as guitar cable, but you will get a terrible hum and buzz problem because there is no shielding.
Actually, you can use guitar cables for signal connections to and from a mixing board, but not PA speakers.
This is really a 'historic' problem caused by the same type of connectors being used for both purposes... if they had entirely different plugs, no-one would worry about mixing them up! This is one reason I like to use gray or orange power cable for my speaker cables - you aren't going to mistake them for signal leads or vice versa.
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