DerbyDad03 wrote in
:

On Nov 19, 3:58*pm, Han wrote:
DerbyDad03 wrote in
news:2964af91-c524-4a98-90d8-
:

A few weeks ago I picked up a surround sound system on Craigslist.
It came with some pretty thin speaker wire, (24 gauge I think) but
the guy said it worked fine for him. I had enough of my own 16g
wire to connect the front and center speakers, but not enough to
connect the rears.

With what I had left after wiring the front and center speakers, I
ran 2 lengths of 16g down into the basement, across the ceiling and
back up into the living room, where I attached them (securely) to
the 24g for the rear speakers. I'd guess 15' of 24g for the right
rear speaker and 25' for the left. The wires ran next to each
through the basement, up into the living room, along one wall and
then parted ways in a corner, with one going up to the right rear
and the other continuing along the floor to the other side of the
room and then up to the left rear speaker.

What I found was that both rear speakers would sort of crackel if I
turned the volume up too high. Low volumes were fine, but I
couldn't crank it up. It wasn't really distortion of the sound
itself, as much as a high pitched tick-tick-tick on top of the
sound. I actually narrowed it down to the left rear speaker wire as
the root cause, the one with the longest wire run of 24g wire. As
long as that length of wire was hooked up, both rear speakers would
crackle at high volume. If I plugged one of the 16g wires to the
front speakers into the left rear jack on the system, there was no
crackling. If I unplugged the left rear and ran just the right
rear, there was no crackling. That tells me that the noise was
definitely related to that run of wire.

This weekend I bought enough 16g wire to rewire both rear speakers,
each with it's own single run of wire from the system to the
speaker. No more crackling even when cranked up loud enough to send
the cat running from the room.

So, to all you would be sound engineers, I ask this simple
question:

Why would a small gauge wire running to that one speaker cause both
rear speakers to crackel? Yes, originally there was small gauge
wire running to both rear speakers, but as I said, when I unplugged
the longest length of 24g to the left speaker, the right speaker
stopped crackling.

What would cause that type of problem?

Since 24 g is rather thin, and probably was NOT a stranded wire,
could there have been a separation that occasional was sufficient to
interrupt the signal?

- Show quoted text -

It was stranded wire. This stuff...

http://www.amazon.com/RCA-100-24-Gau.../dp/B000N7FQD6

Besides, there was no "interruption" of the sound from either speaker.
The crackling was in addition to the regular sound and happened at the
peaks of volume.

So these were 24 gauge strands of wire, still if the strands were
partially broken, with high volum of the speakers, I could see
intermittent contacts that would cause crackling. Definitely, your
replacing the wires did eliminate the problem, so a defect in the wire is
highly likely. But this is a biochemist talking, not an EEE.

--
Best regards
Han
email address is invalid