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Builder install question

post #1 of 9
1/26/07 at 11:23am
Thread Starter 
My family just moved into a new home, one of the builders selling points was the house is pre-wired for surround sound. Unfortunately I know next to nothing about home theater, or distributed A/V systems.

Basic layout is a central TV niche , that has a large wall plate. There are wires running from the large wall plate to 2 small wall pates on each side of the tv nich for speakers, and to 3 plates on the back wall of the room.The electrician used cat-5e wire instead of speaker wire. Is this common to use cat5e for speaker wire? It seems most of my searches show you guys running actual speaker wire that is fairly larger guage. I posted this question in the home theater section, and got one reply. The member thought that the cat-5e would be too small to be used as actual speaker wire. Any other thoughts? I appreciate any input I can get.

Thanks

Larry
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post #2 of 9
1/26/07 at 1:03pm
No it is not at all common to use cat-5 instead of Speaker cable. Check the cable to make sure that it isn't speaker cable. Sometimes the jacket on 16 guage speaker cable can look like cat-5 jacket. What does the writing on the jacket say?
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post #3 of 9
1/26/07 at 5:26pm
Well, I've heard of audio over CAT5, but I don't know that I'd want to send speaker level output through it from a receiver not designed for a cat5 system. I don't know anything 1st hand about CAT5 systems, but that doesn't seem like a recipe for top performance
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post #4 of 9
1/27/07 at 6:03am
Quote:
Originally Posted by lwcato View Post

My family just moved into a new home, one of the builders selling points was the house is pre-wired for surround sound. Unfortunately I know next to nothing about home theater, or distributed A/V systems.

Basic layout is a central TV niche , that has a large wall plate. There are wires running from the large wall plate to 2 small wall pates on each side of the tv nich for speakers, and to 3 plates on the back wall of the room.The electrician used cat-5e wire instead of speaker wire. Is this common to use cat5e for speaker wire? It seems most of my searches show you guys running actual speaker wire that is fairly larger guage. I posted this question in the home theater section, and got one reply. The member thought that the cat-5e would be too small to be used as actual speaker wire. Any other thoughts? I appreciate any input I can get.

Thanks

Larry

Do you care to mention the name of the builder and the state?

Splotto
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post #5 of 9
1/27/07 at 7:44am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Splotto View Post

Do you care to mention the name of the builder and the state?

Splotto

Builder = Trendmaker
state = Tx

I did go back and check the cable, and its clearly marked cat-5e, in fact its the exact same cable they pulled throughout the house for the phone lines.

Do to the dimensions of the room, I imagine it will be very difficult to pull speaker wire back through to the back wall.

Thanks for the info guys.

Larry
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post #6 of 9
1/27/07 at 8:02am
Quote:
Originally Posted by lwcato View Post

Builder = Trendmaker
state = Tx

I did go back and check the cable, and its clearly marked cat-5e, in fact its the exact same cable they pulled throughout the house for the phone lines.

Do to the dimensions of the room, I imagine it will be very difficult to pull speaker wire back through to the back wall.

Thanks for the info guys.

Larry

Ok Thanks. I work for a builder in FLA and I know one of our sub's made the same mistake on a house. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't one of ours and make it right if it was.

Thanks,
Bob
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post #7 of 9
1/27/07 at 8:11am
I would call the builder. It sounds like someone pulled the wrong cable.
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post #8 of 9
1/27/07 at 8:15am
I've used prexisting CAT5e to drive a pair of PA horns connected to an office phone system (for paging), each at a distance close to 300ft. They worked OK, but I wouldn't really like to have my home system wired that way.

Saying that, I do actually run my rear channel speakers through what has to be a hundred plus feet of RG-6 coax. Why? Because it was already there. But then I'm not really into audio that much, prefering instead to focus on video quality.
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post #9 of 9
1/27/07 at 3:26pm
That drives me absolutely nuts. We have had a few customers in our store wanting to put speakers throughout their entire house using cat5. Every time I want to find the builder and slap him in the face. I would see if he could fix this. Cat5 is used for home control and automation. It should never be used for audio or video in a home theater sense.
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