Speaker wire - equal length or shortest?


If you have to make the choice between running wire of equal length to your speakers or to run the shortest run possible what should you do? My components are located
on the side of my listening room. The distance to the far speaker is twice the distance to the close one (roughly 35 feet vs 20 feet) What should I do? (re-locating my equipment or speakers is not an option at this point)
a71spud
It certainly is not RHUBARB what has been said above. You'll probably find us all in agreement here. Best,
Although Albert et al are correct, you specifically stated that you did not want to move any of your equipment. So the advice here should be to use 35ft long equal length speaker cables unless you can move your amp between the speakers.
Not everyone agrees about different lengths. Of course, the wires to the speakers should be as short as possible, but you won't be able to tell the difference between different lengths to the speakers unless the disparity is really big and you have very sensitive hearing (maybe). The only reason(s) different lengths would sound different have to do with resistance capacitance and inductance if those things have an audible effect (I dont want to discuss this, but believe on a completely non-scientifc basis that they do). The signal travels too fast to make an audible difference in arrival time.

I use different lengths in 2 fairly revealing systems (ratio of 1.5 to 1)and am pretty sensitive to differences in cables and have no problems at all.

But, if you are uncomfortable with this, and with 70 feet of wire I hope you're not using something really expensive or else have ore money than you know what to do with, use equal lengths. Why not?
Assuming you use a low-resistance (think thick) speaker cable, you can get away with different lengths. An extra 15 feet of high-resistance cable could result in some FR imbalance between channels. But given that one of your runs is 35 feet, you should be using a low-resistance cable anyway.
Sumiko claims that their OCOS cables can be run with unequal lengths with no sonic consequences.