Speaker Cable / Plastering / Protection

[Alastair]

Synopsis: is it safe to bury surround speaker cables in the plaster without any protection?


Full problem:
Posted this over at AVforums but no-one wants to offer any advice to a forum newb so I thought I give it a go here as I really need to have a go at the w/e.

I'm in the process of re-decorating the lounge and am burying the surround sound speaker cables in the plaster, the problem I have however is that the plaster isn't deep enough to hide 10mm trunking. I've found 8mm but that's still a bit close to the surface.

What other options do I have? Although it's far from ideal, is it safe to bury surround speaker cables in the plaster without any protection? This may be the only option left as chiseling through brick doesn't seem to be a goer

[andrewfee]

I can't see any problem with it, unless the plaster would react with the casing, but I find this to be very unlikely.

I'd be sure to buy some good cabling to use rather than what was supplied with your speakers (if anything) though.

[Crisp_Rapper]

we do it with our cabling with no ill effects... makes for the sexiest looking setups.

[Alastair]

Cheers Andrew, can of worms you want to open there?

I've been reading up about the cabling and as the run from amp along floor and straight up the walls is looking to be about 6m each side and the fronts about 5m each side with the sub at about 5m too I'm slightly hesitant to pay ?5pm and up for cable when I'll be needing 30m of the stuff.

Some people say that cable is the best way to up sound quality, some people say it makes no difference in a blind test. Some people say cat 5 is better than ?20pm cable! I'm also hesitant to permanently plaster in expensive cable as I wont be able to take it with me when we leave.

Have found some cable at an electrical wholesaler near me that's described as: "Twin Stranded Plain Annealed Copper cores laid side by side in a flat figure 8 construction."

The home cinema is an all-in-one Denon DHT500SD, the cable that came with it looks OK but just isn't long enough to cross the room.

Crisp - you mean you just plaster over the bare cable yeah. What do you use at BO to exit the walls? I'm thinking of single-gang blank plates with a hole drilled for the cable cos I can paint these wall coloured and they wont really show.

[Magnakai]

No idea about the plaster, but the people who say that cabling makes no difference are quite frankly either stone-deaf, have never heard decent cables in comparison to useless stuff or are lying.

Think about it as simply as this. No matter how good the signal that your source sends out, it's got to go through a cable to get to the speakers. Quite frankly, it's not going to get there in 100% tip-top condition due to various rules of physics etc. So you want it to get there in as good a condition as possible.

Or more simply, your whole system is only as good as the worst component.

Now, ?500/m cabling is far beyond what's necessary, but proper ?5/m hi-fi speaker cable can go a hell of a long way towards getting your system to sound how it's meant to.
As a rough guide, What Hi-Fi used to say to spend about 10% of the cost of the system on cables and interconnects.

As you're plastering it in and won't be able to ever change it, I'd really consider listening to something decent. Any halfway professional hi-fi shop will let you listen and compare to different cables. Maybe give your closest one a call?

[charlesr]

Currently my speakers are monowired and I'm thinking of doing the same thing in my new house (burying the cable in the wall). However, what if I decided to get some bi-wire speakers !!??!! nightmare!

[Alastair]

If you can use trunking you're recommended to put some string down the trunking too so you can pull through any future wires.

That's why plastering straight on top of the wires is a bad idea but it's looking like my only option.

I knew the cable cost thing was a can of worms. Gonna check out Richer sounds though to see what they offer. 10% of my system is ?50 so that still only gives me ?1.66 a meter.

[charlesr]

Try here for wall sockets. Also has cable. Never tried them mind....

I got some cheapy ?2/m gale cable (richersounds) for my surround speakers and although I haven't compared it to more expensive stuff, I figured the surrounds don't need the ultimate and have the longest cable. Sounds ok to me. And I'm pretty picky. My cd to amp interconnects were ?50/m

[charlesr]

This stuff looks super cool too. If you have a spare room on the other side of the wall to put all your kit, or want to put it all in a cupboard, you can use this to control it all.

[Alastair]

Thanks for the link but I don't fancy breaking the cable unless I have too (and they're really expensive!!).

[charlesr]

Ah good point. Had forgotten about that.

[charlesr]

Crisp, what do you do in store for cables? Just have them coming straight out of the wall and into the speaker?

[mid]

Rather than running cables through the walls, my system has them under the floor - we had a rather gorgeous maple floor put down, so I got them to run my CableTalk Talk 4 underneath while they were at it.

It looks brilliant; the only slight downside, of course, is that I really can't move them if I want to change the setup for some reason.

[Alastair]

How do they get from the floor up the wall to the speakers though?

Or do you have all speakers on floor stands?

[mid]

Full height floor-standers all round in my setup. The difference in price was only that of a decent stand for the bookshelf versions anyway, so I took the silly option. Sounds great now that I can pump full frequencies to every speaker (bar the centre) too. I've got a sub, but it's not been used in over a year as it sounds better without it.