Loft Conversion speaker cable

Twirlywoos

Twirlywoos

Twirlywoos

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Hiya,

I'm having a loft made and the electrician is due in on Wednesday/Thurday. I thought I may as well use this as an opportunity to install some speaker cables and Subwoofer coaxial for Home cinema 5.1 surround.

At this time I don't know the length I'll need but let's just guess around 50 metres.

I don't believe and don't wish to get into a debate over fancy silver lined, snake oil cables, so what good quality, oxygen free affordable cable would you recommend and where can I buy it from?

Additionally I would need some wall face plates too so I can terminate the speakers (possibly using banana plugs)

Thank You
 
QED 4core (if its in ur budget) if not 2core and pro-power twin shielded audio cable or sub.
plates just get any branded type i guess.
 
Just used Van Damme Blue for my installation, run through walls/under floors etc very good quality and value.

I got it off Amazon which was very similar price wise to most places. Also one thing if your pre-wiring everything make sure if wiring for 5.1 you will only ever use 5.1. If you have a few feet behind your listening position to the wall then wire up ready for 7.1, you don't need to use them but at least they're there. Same goes for all the Atmos receivers coming out now with speakers for the ceiling. Its worth doing now before deciding to upgrade later and having to rip the walls apart.

Also have you tested your sub in the room? If you haven't i'd recommend doing this before wiring up a connection for it as the sub can be greatly influenced by where it is placed in the room and usually requires a bit of testing to get right. You don't want to have a faceplate for it at the wrong end of the room from where it sounds best!

Good luck.
 
The only reason not to get the one linked is it isn't marked for polarity.
You could used some 1mm electrical cable if it is fixed in floor/walls.

Personally I'd Google 2.5mm white Loudspeaker Cable. I use it for my £6k sound system.
 
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we use the 16AWG 4 core qed cable when we do a cimena install upto £60K anything more expensive we get custom made speaker cables.
The problem with speaker cable is theres so many out there all have magic dust in that can make a 2W speaker sound like a 100W monster.
If you dont have the budget just get a basic 2 core cable at the end of the day if your not spending loads and loads you wont really get the benefit.
So just get whats in your budget but prob a bit more than the one you linked.
Im no expert in the area i just do installs on expensive cinemas for private customers who have far to much money, but i don't spec anything, im just saying what iv heard etc.
 
If you're doing a loft conversion, then the chance are high that you're also trying to hide as much of the cabling as possible. This is confirmed when you said you'll be using speaker wall plates. So it makes sense to do the job right first time. That's a much cheaper option in the long run than under spec'ing the cable and then having to rip up floors or break in to walls to go replace it for something more suitable at a later date.

For speaker wire:

1) you're looking for solid copper as opposed to the cheaper copper coated aluminium (CCA) or steel (CCS) often sold on Ebay and through less reputable resellers ('tick one' for the Symphony)

2) power loss increases with distance and can be offset somewhat by thickness; so the longer the runs then the thicker the cable required to compensate. Minimum thickness should be 0.75mm2 cross sectional area (CSA). 1.5mm2 is better. The power loss over short distances (<5m) is minimal (aprx 5% for 0.75mm2, 2.5% for 1.5mm2), but grows with distance (10% and 5% respectfully at 10m).

The other effect of cable thickness is in damping. This is how fast the speaker cone can be brought to rest after a note finishes. Thicker cable has better properties in this respect, but this is more a factor with large speakers rather than smaller satellites.

That cable from Ebay is 0.4mm2 CSA. That's bell wire thickness. It's crap for home cinema; far too thin. That's why it is cheap. Bell wire like that will lose about 15-20% of the amplifier power on a 10m run.You're just giving away system performance because you don't appreciate the significance yet that cable diameter makes. To put it another way, if you had to try to buy back that power loss with bigger amps then it would cost you about 5x more than what you saved on buying cheap speaker cable. It's much cheaper to avoid the loss in the first place than try to claw it back later on.

3) number of conductors - This is to do with how electrons flow though conductors. It's called 'skin effect' and it describes how lower frequencies travel deeper in the core of each conductor and higher frequencies travel closer to the surface. Cables with hundreds of tiny filaments are okay for high frequency, but the conductors don't work so well for bass. Apparently the optimum balance of surface area to conductor cross section is 42 stand @ 0.75mm2 and 79 strand @ 1.5mm2.


Sub cable:

Aerial coax (use WF100, not the cheap rubbish) would do perfectly will for a sub cable. It's much better specified than most of the sub cables sold both cheap and expensive that have no specification at all. The only problems with WF100 are that it's thick and doesn't bend so easily.

QED makes 'Performance miniature subwoofer cable' which is good and very thin. It's pricey though at £10 per metre with plugs fitted. If you go on Ebay and type in "QED Performance mini" you'll find some used cables being sold at a fraction of the price. There's also a seller doing a super-thin alternative to QED that's better specified and a lot cheaper.
 
Thanks lucid I'll get some coax stuff from mark grant it's what I used downstairs. For speaker cable I'll use some fisual super pearl 2.5mm

Is there anything I should get installed whilst the walls are bare? Should I use any leftover cat6a cable for hdmi?

Are there any other gadgets I should look into?
 
The Fisual speaker cable will be fine.

Mark Grant makes good quality interconnects. The only issue I have personally is with the Canare phono plugs. They put a lot of leverage force on chassis connections due to the length of the plug body and the weight of cable being supported. The Canare cable is thick and heavy. Before you press the button on the Canare do have a look at the "Super-thin 7 m Subwoofer Leads" on Ebay. The construction is the same double braided shielding. The Canare has lower attenuation due to the thicker construction, but in all other respects the cable specs are very similar.

Cat cable is always useful. On my projects I wire all devices that need an Ethernet connection rather than relying on wireless. Stuff just works better on copper. I wouldn't replace HDMI with Ethernet though unless distance was an issue: Signals won't look any better travelling via Cat cable, but the boxes on each end will cost a lot more and may downscale the image quality. Decent quality HDMI is good for up to 20 mtrs.

Speaker points: 5.1 surrounds go on the side walls rather than the rear (behind you). Depending on the room size you might want to think about wiring for 1) front effects 2) 7.1 rears 3) second sub position

I also encourage customers to wire for an IR Relay/repeater so that the AV gear can go at the back of the room. That leaves the front clutter free and there's no distracting twinkly lights spoiling the vista when the room lights are low.

Speaking of lights, what have you planned for lighting control?
 
lucid said:
The Fisual speaker cable will be fine.

Mark Grant makes good quality interconnects. The only issue I have personally is with the Canare phono plugs. They put a lot of leverage force on chassis connections due to the length of the plug body and the weight of cable being supported. The Canare cable is thick and heavy. Before you press the button on the Canare do have a look at the "Super-thin 7 m Subwoofer Leads" on Ebay. The construction is the same double braided shielding. The Canare has lower attenuation due to the thicker construction, but in all other respects the cable specs are very similar.

Cat cable is always useful. On my projects I wire all devices that need an Ethernet connection rather than relying on wireless. Stuff just works better on copper. I wouldn't replace HDMI with Ethernet though unless distance was an issue: Signals won't look any better travelling via Cat cable, but the boxes on each end will cost a lot more and may downscale the image quality. Decent quality HDMI is good for up to 20 mtrs.

Speaker points: 5.1 surrounds go on the side walls rather than the rear (behind you). Depending on the room size you might want to think about wiring for 1) front effects 2) 7.1 rears 3) second sub position

I also encourage customers to wire for an IR Relay/repeater so that the AV gear can go at the back of the room. That leaves the front clutter free and there's no distracting twinkly lights spoiling the vista when the room lights are low.

Speaking of lights, what have you planned for lighting control?
Click to expand...

Thanks will look on ebay. The lights will be dimable LED spot lights, no fancy Arduno lighting unfortunately. Good shout on the repeater, I take it I will need one per device. So that's AV receiver, Blu Ray Player and TV.
 
no you dont need 1 per device depending on what type of ir extender you go for.
But always good practice to run more than 1 cat cable just incase, like lucid said cat cable is useful especially if its installed, no good being left on the drum, so if you have any spare just chuck it in places you think you may have a device of some kind.
 
As long as you have some basic light control (Varlight dimmers for LED are effective and inexpensive) then you've got the basics covered.

IR Repeater: One IR receiver under the display is wired back to a splitter/amplifier block that runs 4 or 6 output sockets. Each socket can accept an IR re-emitter on a long thin wire. The emitters are about the size of half a pea. They stick over the IR Receiver windows on each device. There are single emitters and also double emitters (one jack plug to two wired emitters). That'll double up the effective number of devices that can be controlled to 8~12. Mix and match singles and doubles as required; makes no difference to the power output.

Repeater kits are available at various prices. The cheap stuff works okay. The more expensive stuff works better. Something like the Xantech stuff achieves about 98% pass-thru rate even in difficult lighting situations.

A couple of things to be aware of: The first, 3D glasses working off an IR emitter in a TV or projector; they can play havoc with any other IR remotes, even the manufacturer's own remote direct to a player or amp. Second, some devices are intolerant of receiving two lots of the same IR command from different sources. e.g. the signal received via a repeater and direct from the IR remote. If the gear is going to be at the front of the room either don't use an IR based repeater, or put the gear in a cabinet with solid doors, or use an RF repeater with a touchscreen remote.
 
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