unlabeled in-wall CL2 speaker wire - which is postive?

chris2009

17 years ago

I'm trying to add some new wire to an existing, older installation of in-wall speaker wire.

The old stuff is likely CL2, is brown and has no distinguishing marks regarding positive/negative designations.

I can't even tell if each side of the old wire is shaped differently, which would make it easy to determine.

Is there some subtle way that older (35 years) in-wall speaker wire was made to make identifing pos / neg easy? If not, any suggestions on how to figure this out?

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Comments (3)

pjb999
17 years ago
Sometimes one side of the figure-8 was ridged, other times if it's clear, one side would be tinned.

Easiest solution is just connect a battery to one side, and a multimeter to the other, and see which is + that way.
chris2009
Original Author
17 years ago
ah - that seems cool. When you say "to one side", do you mean one "end" of one side of the cable? What would you set the multimeter to?
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shadow700
17 years ago
Mark the leads of the cable where you are going to hook the battery "+" and "-" and attach them to the appropriate battery terminals.

At the other side, set your multimeter to VDC.
Measure the voltage across the cable.

If the voltage displayed is positive, mark the red terminal wire '+' and the other one '-'.

If the voltage displayed is negative, mark the red terminal wire '-' and the other one '+'.