Splicing RCA to speaker wire? (1 Viewer)

[Dan_Morez]

I recently bought 500 ft. of Tributary 12ga. in-wall speaker wire and have about 150 ft. left over. I still need to run my subwoofer cable though, Does anyone know if it would be ok to splice RCA plugs onto the wire, or would this degrade the sound quality? or is it just not possible....I've never tried splicing an rca connection before....any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Dan M.

 

[KenA]

Its possible. I do it for short speaker runs from my amp to a wall panel. Having a RCA connector at the wall panel uses less space than a couple of banana plugs. You could use the speaker wire for a line-level run to your sub, but it may be subject to RF interference. You're better off using shielded coax.

 

[Dave Poehlman]

I've done this a couple of times. Once to connect the line-out on my upstairs receiver to the line-in on my downstairs one. This allowed me to listen to the same music throughout the house.

I just used some cheap-o Radio Shack RCA plugs and soldered them to some 18ga speaker wire. The run was probably about 25 ft. I did have a little hum from electrical lines... but, it was only barely audible when there was silence between music. Since I was only using this connection for ambient listening and for parties (because I'm such a party animal ), the hum didn't bother me.

I've just done the same thing recently for my subwoofer out. A short run of probably 10 feet to go over a doorway. It crosses perpendicular to two electrical runs and there is no hum whatsoever.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

I make custom cables, and I can tell you that getting RCA to 12qa wire is going to be a problem. And however you manage to accomplish it, it won’t be pretty – visually, I mean.

What you can do is go to Radio Shack. They sell some skinny speaker wire with RCA jacks on one end. It’s probably something like 20ga, though. About the only way to solidly splice it is to use wire nuts. It may even require a transitional “step-up” section in between, say 16ga.

Like I said, it won’t be pretty.

The EMI problem has already been mentioned. Be sure and keep it as far away from AC lines as possible.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Scott.J]

You could do it, probably would cut down on the quality, but not significantly.