Consumer Warning: Competing Category, Coax and Bulk Speaker Wire Products Don’t Hold Up to Spec Testing

Metra Home Theater Group can legitimately advertise that when it comes to our category, coax and bulk speaker wire, our brands meet or exceed specifications. How do we know this? We perform rigorous 3rd party testing on our bulk wires to ensure that once sealed inside walls, integrators won’t have an issue with our products. While other competitors state that they’ll “replace any wire that doesn’t work”, ripping out wires from a wall isn’t always an option for integrators.

While we would gladly replace any of our wires that fail, we feel that they should not be allowed to fail at all in the first place.

We decided to put our competitors’ category, coax and bulk speaker wire through the same, independent testing and were surprised by the results. Multiple test results revealed inferior products that were not up to spec, as claimed by the manufacturers. What caused these products to fail the test? Ultimately, cheap materials and poor construction. When the wires were examined, researchers found that a looser twist ratio with the shield and / or cable with less overall copper, resulting in less noise reduction. The copper material used was also not pure, 100% copper. But that’s not all. Insufficient jacket density and cable gauges were seen in these “leading” competitor products, which makes the wire harder to cut for integrators. In summary this means more time and waste.

While we won’t call out names or bash competitors directly, we feel this is a concern and something every integrator, distributor and customer should know.

The takeaway?

Small savings over a 500 or 1,000 foot box of cable could easily be lost once you spend hours troubleshooting a mystery problem, especially when the only resolution would be to rip out all the wire or cable and start over again. Is it worth saving a few bucks? We don’t think so. Start with our high quality, performance tested products the first time. Metra Home Theater Group only uses 100% pure copper in our products and has independently tested our wires and cables to ensure that they will meet or exceed specifications.