How do I add length to a rear speaker wire?
I purchase a philips HTIB and need about 7ft of extra wire for the left speaker to mount it on the wall. How do I splice the wire? The end that connects to the unit is color-coded and has a specific connector. Can I splice it in the middle and add more wire? If so, how?
You could just cut the speaker wire and splice in seven extra feet of speaker wire, but make sure to keep track of which wire should be connected to which wire. There are two wires inside of speaker wire; one carries the signal to the speaker (positive), and the other carries the signal back to the receiver (negative). If you don't connect the correct wire on one side of the splice to its corresponding wire on the other side of the splice you risk reversing the polarity of the signal, which can severely damage your speaker.
You should also make sure to get the correct gauge speaker wire. The gauge of the speaker wire is the actual thickness of the wire. The thicker the wire is the lower the resistance the signal will encounter on its way to the speaker and back to the receiver and the thinner the wire is the higher the resistance is. If you have too thin a wire the resistance will be too great for the signal and you could lose volume, and it could also produce heat damage to the wire casing.
The best way to add length to your speaker wire would be to dismantle the speaker casing and re-solder a length of the correct gauge speaker wire to the wire contacts inside the speaker, and then re-solder the other end of your new wire to an appropriate connector. I would not suggest attempting this yourself, but you could contact the manufacturer and get the name of a local authorized service center that could do this for you. I hope this helps!
15 years, 2 months ago
by
Posted by:
AllanBB
from
Minneapolis