In wall speaker wire for home theatre

[ylwisdom02]

I am building a home theater in my basement. I want to put a surround sound system and ceiling mounted projector in the theater. What type of in wall speaker wire should I use. What regulations or codes do I need to be aware of?

thanks

Troie

[peterselby7]

Use regular 12 gauge house wire. If you are not pushing a large amount of current (less than 200 watts) you can get away with 14 gauge. House wire actually sounds really good. I've tested it against very expensive dedicated speaker wire. The 12 guage speaker wire (solid core house construction wire) is a good do it all cable. It will suit your needs in nearly any situation and accommodate upgrades well. (if you get a high powered amp later)

You can also calculate the distance and wattage needs to determine what gauge will work best for you.

reference article: 12 guage speaker wire (http://www.home-speaker.net/12-guage-speaker-wire.html)

[tooltroll]

Troie,

Speaker installations are considered 'low voltage' and aren't covered by code, and Peter is absolutely right when he says that plain old romex sounds just fine.
Anyone trying to sell you that "oxygen-free, ropelaid, heavy-duty, hi-fidelity, blessed-by-the-space-pope-with-a-piece-of-the-true-cross" crap for $$$/ft. is a scammer and rip-off artist and deserves to be second against the wall when the revolution comes. With [I]all the different parameters of all the different components that go into a typical sound system, the wire has about the least effect of any of it. Speaker placement alone affects the sound way more than the wire, not to mention the speaker cabinet design, room acoustics, amplifier, etc., etc.

[Custom Homes]

For your ceiling mount projector, I would run 2" hollow pipe (vacuum works well) in your ceiling so you have the ability to fish in wire to your projector. HDMI cable is a must but it's nice to have the option to bring in additional cables if needed.

[giddonah]

That article says 12 gauge speaker wire...

While you can use romex, I wouldn't just for the sake of installation and service. Romex is a solid wire which work hardens when bent. Eventually, that work hardening makes it brittle and it will break. Romex isn't that soft, can you imagine wiring a rack with romex, or a romex umbilical?? I'd be pissed if I had to work on something like that. Just use stranded wire. While the sound quality difference is meaningless, the actual application isn't. There's a reason we use speaker wire and not romex.

Unless specified by the application, we just about exclusively use 14 gauge stranded wire. It's only the ridiculous theaters that we step up to 12 gauge. You can probably get away with 16 or even 18 gauge depending on how much power you're pushing. We don't though.

Definitely put in a 2" smurf tube to the projector. If you don't want to bother with that, a bare minimum would be three coax and three cat5. You can do component with the three coax and if you wanted to later, you could use two cat5's with HDMI baluns. The third cat5 is for control. Depending on the distance, the baluns might end up being cheaper than a long HDMI cable.

There actually are some codes about low voltage. I don't have my book with me, but there are a few pages for LV in the NEC. If our wires are installed before the 4-way, they're part of the inspection, but as always that's up to the inspector. We had one make us move our wires further away from some romes runs (another 2" away...). Most inspectors on residential jobs don't bother us about our stuff (probably because we're good at what we do).