can i use regular ol speaker wire to extend my surround sound speakers reach? im thinking, cut the surround sound speaker wire in the middle and attach regular speaker wire. is this ok to do, or will i jack it up?thanks in advance
You can run speakers for well over a few hundred feet if you want. You need to make sure you are using good quality wire for your speakers. 16 AWG zip cord works very well and it's cheaper than getting regular speaker wire. You really don't want to use a regular stereo amplifier. Do not hook up your speakers in series or parallel. What you need is a Audio Distribution Amp that has multiple outputs for general PA use. Hope this helps!
Be careful with keeping the polarity unchanged. Do not cross the wires when adding a length of another type of wire. Wires have either a stripe or a nerve identifying the polarity. If you do cross them, the sound will be out of phase. This may or may not be noticeable, but why to gamble.
It depends on what you mean by regular speaker wire and how long the run is, under 25 ft any 18 gauge or thicker gauge would be good 30 to 50 ft I would use at least 16 gauge and for myself 14 gauge would be better, but its not necessary. Also for longer runs I would replace the full length of the wire with a thicker gauge wirenot just splice it in.
Mike - The other thing you need to do is make sure the positive and negative on the extension cable is the same as the existing wire. When you add the wire, just make sure you connect the positive and negative on each end of the added wire to the positives and negatives of the existing wire. The speakers will work either way but if you swap the positive and negative the speakers will be out of phase and the sound will be effected somewhat.
You can splice the wires to add length and yes it should be fine as long as you use the same gauge speaker wire, however, for the best sound quality the wire should try to have as little resistance as possible. The only downfall to extending the wire is that the more length you add to a wire the more resistance you add as well making the sound quality go down. ie speaker wire should try to be as short in length as possible. additional: yes, if you're going to splice it I would splice closer to the reciever just to conceal the splice a little more, also if you use wire nuts you may want to wrap it with a little electrical tape to give it some added support, but compression sleeves work the best additional, additional: typically with speaker wires the black is considered to be the negative side, however there isn't necessarily a set side, the biggest concern is to keep the polarity the same, for example, both the speaker and the receiver have symbols above the two terminals a + and a - symbol, just make sure that if you hook the black wire up to the - side on the speaker terminal that you also hook it up to the - side of the receiver terminal. Hope this helps.
