In article . com,
wrote:
Hello All,

Recently renovated our family room and installed speaker wire to all
four corners for eventual surround sound. I have the levitron speaker
posts/wall plates on the end locations that use one black and one red
post for a speaker wire pair. All four wire pairs go back to a single
gang box that also has one coax and one ethernet cable installed in it.

Planned on using a six-gang levitron wall plate, two for the coax and
ethernet and four for the speaker wire, but seems like each speaker
wire needs two posts, for a total of eight posts. I can't seem to find
a single speaker post that will accept both speaker wires (pos and
neg), and nobody makes a 10 gang wall plate (not enough room).

I was just hoping to find a clean wall plate solution and not leave the
gang box uncovered with wires hanging out of it.


The ideal solution would be to replace the single gang box, with a 4" square
deep box, or simply a 2 gang telecom mud ring. You don't actually need a
box for speaker/telecom/data/coax. You can get rings that can be cut-in
and mounted directly to the sheetrock.

You are going to run into problems with fitting all those wires in the box,
and putting a plate on, especially the coax.

You could also get a 2 gang wiremold extention box, and mount that over the
existing box, and use a 2 gang plate, which would give you a maximum of
12 spaces for the quickport modules. It looks like you will need 10 spaces
total, 8 speaker (4 pairs), 1 data, 1 coax. The box will stick out from the
wall about 2 inches.

If I were doing this, I would bring the speaker lines in to one 2 gang mudring,
network/telephone into another, and coax into a third. I would run a minimum
of 2 net, 2 tel, and 2 coax, and I might even go as far as 4-6 coax
(antenna, cable, 2 sat, in-house distribution, spare), run to a central
location for patching. Think dual-tuner satellite receivers. Putting 1-1/2"
or 2" conduit in to allow pulling new cables back to your patch area is a
good thing.



Not knowing a whole lot about wiring speakers, would it be possible to
wire all four negative sides of the speaker pairs to a single post, and
use seperate posts for the positive sides of the pairs? Then I could
use an eight gang plate and blank one out (five for speakers, two for
cable/ethernet). I am not about to try this since I don't even have
any equipment to install, just curious if this would fry something.


As previously mentioned, not a good idea. A lot of amplifiers today are
push-pull design, with neither side being grounded. Grounding either side
can kill the amplifier.



Thanks!



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