As for the wires...well, basically a 16 ga, 4 ga, whatever is made up of lots of 32ish gauge wires in parallel...that should answer that question.

As to amp settings...watch those bass boost controls...they tend to suck. In addition to being very sloppy, they can eat up all your amp head room in a hurry. Figure 3db boost (be it from a bass boost knob, you headunit, whatever) takes twice as much power, and you'll see how a 12db boost can cause lots of problems.

Toby