Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions speaker wires to short.

Ok, I am reorganizing my AV equipment with the addition of new Emotiva amp. The amp weighs so much I need to place it lower in my DIY AV rack so it does not break the shelfs.

Anyway when I wired my surrounds, stupid me did not allow for a lot of extra slack. The speaker wire will barely reach the amp, but with no slack.

Is there some type of extension I can add to get more distance without sacrificing sound transmission quality to my Qs8's?

I seemed to see some longer banana plugs once, which might work. I really don't want to twist another piece of speaker wire to the existing run if I don't have to...

Thanks, Randy

Randy what material are your shelves made from?

I placed two 40 lb. buckets of drywall mud (80lbs) on each of our extended shelves whenever we built them to test the strength of each shelf, ours is made from 3/4" MDF with heavy duty shelf rollers ... I bet we could have added another 50lbs without any problems.




Could you terminate the in-wall wires via a wall plate and use short runs of speaker wires with banana plugs on either end for the connects?

Edited to add...

This is how we did ours...

I second BrotherBob's suggestion about the wall plates. As I'm designing my media room, I found a 7.1 plate that's around $30, though I don't know if the 3-gang layout works for you or not:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/pshowdetl...FTOKEN=88094781

So are those solder type, or do they have RCA jacks on the backside?

You can just go ahead and splice on some more wire with some crimps or better yet, solder. You shouldnt notice a difference, especially not with surrounds. Dont splice wire without mechanically and electrically making a good connection, like soldering. The "western union" is good for this application. You can see it being done here:

http://www.mmxpress.com/technical/connections.htm

Hey Rick,

I may have to build a new shelf unit. I have an old unit I built back in college out of oak. It is very sturdy, however all that is holding up the shelves are those gold colored shelf brackets like this:



They do fine with my Denon 2805, HTPC, CD player, and even my Emotiva Amp right now. However, once I add additional monblocks and 2-channel modules to the chassis it will get very heavy. Currently I'm at about 60lbs with only 2 mono's added. Total weight with 7 mono's is pushing 120lbs.

In regards to the wiring, I guess I was concerned about signal loss or quality loss by having more links in the chain. Right now I have bare wire connections from receiver to speakers.

I was thinking about some of those banana plugs that have a 45degree angle tothem, but I guess I should consider wall plates, and then just add enought cable to go from the wall plate to the amp or Denon.

Thanks for the help..

Randy the way we built our shelves was very easy, all the material was bought from Home Depot. I wanted a unit that would haul the mail because at the time I measured the top shelf for a 75 lb Rotel 5 ch amp that I was considering and I wanted the shelf strong enough to hold the weight in the extended position with strength to spare.

Also regarding the wall plates, I referred to several sources (including Alan) about signal loss and was assured that as long as there were good connections no signal loss would occur using the wall plate/plug setup ... after having my system going for over a year now I'll most certainly agree.

Anybody ever tested the resistance of solder in a wire splice? I have, the wire went from .1 ohms to .11, not a big difference, so solder away if you want to.