Topic: Silver in the walls

[kskreider]

Now that I remodeled our entire kitchen I am going to begin working on the family room.  I will have good attic access to the wall the TV and entertainment system will be anchored to.  I have a couple of questions though.

I plan on pulling Romex from the lower wall outlet to an upper recessed 'clock outlet' to allow easy power for the the wall-mounted TV.  I don't want to pull interconnects and speaker wires through the same spot, correct?

Also, with respect to satellite speakers, I was thinking about pulling colored, twisted pairs of silver milspec just for ease of ID and was curious about what others thought.  Should I get a pair that is shielded?  Dumb idea all together?  There seems to be lots of unshielded 25' pairs on Fleabay.  If I do should I keep it within a certain AWG range?

Thanks!

[Krispy D]

I just did this.  I would recommend looking into speaker wire that is rated for in wall use.  The insurance ramifications could be pretty serious otherwise. 

[page]

Also, consider PVC piping while you have the walls in shambles.

If you lay a pipe or two in the walls throughout the house with pull cables inside, the next time you want to run new cables, you can drop them through the pipes and pull on the pull cables to lay cabling easily, everything terminates easily enough and it's the most future resistant method of cabling I've seen. If you have any interest, let me know and I'll type up a description that isn't so half-assed.

[JD]

Try not to run any speaker cables parallel with any ac wires. This helps prevent transient noises from the AC wires being picked up by the speaker cables.

Twisted pairs will help cancel out unwanted noises, as will shielding. If using shielded wire, be sure the shielding is continuous throughout the whole run, but only grounded at the source end.

[kskreider]

Great tips.  Unfortunately the wall wont be in shambles so I will have to stuff it with a flexible conduit of some kind.  I also figured that shielding should help with interference but I didn't know about grounding at the source.  I will just run the power and component/speaker wires separately.

A round on me.

[Idle Wind]

my kitchen walls are out, and I'd like to run some speaker wire - picked up some cambridge soundworks in ceilings real cheap on their site (overstock).  also run some CAT 5 or 6, so I can put in a touchscreen w/gigabit (when they come out...) to run a media server.

not sure about the insurance ramifications.  I was going to use some monster auto speaker cable I picked up pretty cheap as well.  I know it's not the best, but when you're already way over budget......

any suggestions would be great...

[kskreider]

Pull as much as you can while you have your walls open man.  In fact if you are pulling CAT5 I would pull pairs even if you know that you are only going to hook one set up.  Just tie a string onto the extra and feel warm and fuzzy knowing that it is there is you need it down the road.

I am at the point where I have our TV moved now and pulled Romex from a lower outlet to an upper clock outlet behind the TV to power it.  On the other side of the stud I pulled as many friggin AV cables as I could to the back of the TV so I would only have to do it one time. 

Right now I still only have L/R main speakers hooked up to the 3000ES but it will be simple to pull wire for in-walls or ceilings later since the access is wide open and not obstructed by insulation.  I just cant figure out what to get and have seen some really nice ones lately.  It is the part of the project that I have temporarily hung up, so to speak.

[Idle Wind]

cambridge soundworks has some really good deals on overstock.
might not be as high end as you're looking for, but they're pretty decent, and
the price can't be beat.....

http://cambridgesoundworks.com/store/category.cgi?category=landing_architectural