Need to move surround sound and home sound wiring

8 years ago

My house was built in 1986. It has surround sound wired into the family room and also has ceiling speakers in separate living rooms and dining rooms. The wires run all run to a built in cabinet in the family room and I want to remove it and move the wires to another wall. I am also raising the sunken floor in this family room to make it level with our kitchen and with our more formal living room.

Can i add to the wires and run them under the raised floor to another wall? I know wireless is now the way to go but since this controlls 3 different rooms of speakers and also I dont want to replace all the expensive equipment with wireless I am hoping to just move the wires to another wall that will help me create a more open floor plan? I have always loved that the current system let me turn speakers off and on if the diffent rooms. TIA for any information.

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Comments (4)

kenjwy
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
In all likelihood, yes. The resistance gets higher the longer the wire gets, so use heavy gauge wire for your extensions (such as AWG 12, rather than 16 or 14) and take care to make good connections where you splice the wire. Also I think with some equipment they recommend using wire of the same length for the right and left channel, even if you don't actually have to do so based on speaker placement.
mtvhike
8 years ago
I would run flexible conduits for the wires to each location. That way, you could make future changes easier. As Ken says, use 12 gauge wire; I use stranded wire for speaker wiring because it is more flexible. If you have trouble connecting the wires to the devices because of the stranding, tin them with solder.
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bry911
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Also I think with some equipment they recommend using wire of the same length for the right and left channel, even if you don't actually have to do so based on speaker placement.

This is a very popular myth that must have been originated by guys selling speaker wire. For speakers, it doesn't really matter. The electromagnetic field will move through a 12 awg copper wire at about 900 million feet per second. You are not going to notice the sound delay caused by a few extra feet of wire.

This is just an FYI...

Also never bother buying better speaker wire (like monster cables etc). I assure you that there is no technology out there that will affect the quality of an electromagnetic field running through copper wire other than gauge.
Ron Natalie
8 years ago
I used to laugh about people complaining that when they went to single DACs in the CD players that a phase-shift was introduced, what's worse...a frequency dependent phase shift. I pointed out that what they really had was a 22 microsecond delay rather than a "phase shift." And if they would move one speaker .3 inches farther back from the listener, it would be completely obliterated.