wired
August 4th, 2006 by Lawrence David
warm summer nights put me in a soldering mood. i’ve dedicated a bunch of my free time lately to jacks, plugs, and cables (leaving our kitchen table a mess).
motivating the orgy of wires has been a recent resolution to wire our entire apartment. i’ve got this web-based mp3 box piping music through my home-made soundcard [below]; i thought it’d be nifty to have the music accesible in each room of our place. not overly ambitious, given that our modest apartment only has about 5 rooms. although i guess the whole project has been a bit silly, since i could just turn up the volume really loudly in one room. but what would be the fun in a solution like that?
problem is, as usual, i’m cheap. so wireless hookups for the amps i’ve got around the house were out of the question. luckily, i actually had about 100 feet of speaker cable and another 50 feet of interconnect cable lying around (what, you don’t?). i scored about another 150 feet of cable from home depot by converting ethernet cable into audio cables. (notes here on how to do it – cat5 makes really cheap cable!)
turned out that making cables was the easy part; threading all those wires behind bookshelves and taping them flush against our 100-year-old house’s wooden mouldings was the tricky step. lots of pushing, bending, and kneeling. electricians must be in wonderful shape.
in the end, i learned what they say is true: “all wires lead to the pantry.” that poor overstuffed pantry is home to a printer, an overheating server, and all manner of canned meats. i love our apartment.
while I’m sure the cat 5 cable will work perfect for your applications, i found a nice article that may interest you on speaker cabling.
http://www.andrewlouie.com/pics/speaker_guide.pdf