Inwall cabling: will speaker & video interact? (1 Viewer)

[mctague]

I know ac lines are to be avoided / crossed at 90 degree angles...but my question is: Is it okay to locate speaker wire near video cables (coax & component)?
I'm about to embark on relocating my rack....

 

[Bob McElfresh]

The simple answer is that you can run various cables containing line-level signals (Video, un-amplified audio) together. Just make sure they are all using coaxial or shielded types of wires. (Most of them are already so dont worry).
But speaker wires are un-shielded, and they carry WATTS of power. So they ARE power wires. You want to run these away from video and line-level audio wires.
If you are running things to electrical outlet-box's, I would suggest you do 2: One box for video & line-level, and another for speaker wires.
A better thing to do is to buy blank wall-plates and drill holes. Pull enough wire that it goes un-broken from source to destination and thread this through the wall-plates.
Later, when you sell the house you can just seal up the box with a new wall plate, or install wall-plates with connectors on it.
Hope this helps.

 

[mctague]

Good thing I asked then, Bob. I was already planning on having 2 electrical boxes....so what would be a safe distance between speaker & video cables?
I was also planning on pulling the component cable straight through, though I was gonna terminate the speaker wire because I wanted to use 4-conductor wire. Hafta rethink that one, I would LOVE to save the money on all those speaker terminals...but I would need alot more speaker wire. Plus I agree with avoiding extra connectors, though I don't expect perfection from my HT. A music only system I have has unterminated bare speaker wire...which sounds GREAT.