Professionally installed speaker wire right next to electrical Romex wiring - how bad is it?

[Quantum Noisemaker]

Hey everyone. My folks recently bought a house that had some 12 AWG pre-installed 4 conductor speaker wire and in-wall speaker cutouts, and I took that as an opportunity to set up a really nice multi-room music listening setup for them. The first problem I ran into was that the speaker wires terminated in a completely enclosed and unventilated cabinet; not the best place to install multiple amps. Easy solution, I thought; I’ll just re-route the wires to the new network rack I’m building in the basement and install the amps there.

This is where I noticed the first major problem. Whoever originally installed the speaker wires routed them right next to and in parallel with 15 amp Romex wiring. At first I thought only parallel runs were in the basement, but later on I found some runs up in the wall as well (see the pictures below). This lead me to this forum to ask these 2 questions:

1. How detrimental is it to run speaker wire this close to romex? Are these wires usable, or should I just re-run new wires myself?
2. Will having amplifiers on a network rack cause issues/interference if the rack is a few meters from a central vac and a whole home water booster pump? If so, how can I mitigate this?

Thanks for the help and any input you can provide!

Note on wires in pictures: Speaker wire is the gray wire, whereas the electrical Romex is white.

 

[Eppie]

The first and last photo look ok to me. You have a few inches of separation. Not fond of the 3rd photo in-wall with the cables right next to each other. Maybe you can cut an opening top and bottom and separate the cables a bit. Bear in mind that any 60 cycle noise induced into speaker wires will not likely be audible as the signal will be so small relative to the signal from the amps. Most modern amps should not be susceptible to the noise feeding back into the amps either, but if you end up with that one amp brand that picks up hum it can be a PITA to fix, so best to keep the wires away from romex. Not sure what the minimum is but there are some installers here that will hopefully comment. @BMXTRIX ?

If the central vac and pump are a few metres away I would not be too concerned unless they are old and there is a chance that the brushes on the motor are causing sparks. Doesn't sound likely in your case. You want the central vac and pump to be on separate circuits (breakers) from your audio gear. These are often on their own breakers. Most amps and receivers have pretty good filtration on their power supplies, so if electrical noise is a concern, keep your interconnects short and use good quality cables (but not crazy expensive ones). My central vac is 5m from my AVR on a separate circuit and I have never experienced noise issues.

 

[BMXTRIX]

1. How detrimental is it to run speaker wire this close to romex? Are these wires usable, or should I just re-run new wires myself?

While it is not recommended, it rarely has any impact whatsoever on the speakers that are being used. It is almost inevitable that electricians will be running wires up and down locations where speaker wires also need to be installed. It happens time and time and time again. So, speaker wires are run all the time next to romex and there is rarely any perceivable impact at all. Dimmers would be the most notorious potential problem causer in these installations as they produce an incredible amount of RF interference, but even then, they rarely impact the speakers. I REALLY wouldn't worry about it.

2. Will having amplifiers on a network rack cause issues/interference if the rack is a few meters from a central vac and a whole home water booster pump? If so, how can I mitigate this?

No, it will not. You can always use a reasonable UPS or power conditioner unit in the AV rack to help keep things as clean as possible. Likewise, ensuring you have a dedicated circuit or two for your AV equipment can help keep RF interference down. But, with decent in rack cabling and good amplifiers, you should not run into any issues. My equipment racks sit just a few feet away from my hot water heater and HVAC system in my home and it's not a big deal. Keep in mind that a central vac isn't going to be running all the time, so isn't much of an issue even if it were to cause some noise in the system when it was on, which is still unlikely.

Yes, I would have tried to have run those speaker wires at least towards the bottom edge of the joist away from the electrical wiring, but as it stands, I wouldn't worry all that much about it. If you are really concerned, you can always hook up a speaker and a decent amp and see if there is any noise that is audible. I wouldn't expect it though.

In my experience, the quality of the whole house amplifiers is far more of an impact to the system than almost anything else.

For reference in my home: https://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/so-here-we-go-24-a-v-zones-w-10-sources.83272/

 

[highfigh]

Hey everyone. My folks recently bought a house that had some 12 AWG pre-installed 4 conductor speaker wire and in-wall speaker cutouts, and I took that as an opportunity to set up a really nice multi-room music listening setup for them. The first problem I ran into was that the speaker wires terminated in a completely enclosed and unventilated cabinet; not the best place to install multiple amps. Easy solution, I thought; I’ll just re-route the wires to the new network rack I’m building in the basement and install the amps there.

This is where I noticed the first major problem. Whoever originally installed the speaker wires routed them right next to and in parallel with 15 amp Romex wiring. At first I thought only parallel runs were in the basement, but later on I found some runs up in the wall as well (see the pictures below). This lead me to this forum to ask these 2 questions:

1. How detrimental is it to run speaker wire this close to romex? Are these wires usable, or should I just re-run new wires myself?
2. Will having amplifiers on a network rack cause issues/interference if the rack is a few meters from a central vac and a whole home water booster pump? If so, how can I mitigate this?

Thanks for the help and any input you can provide!

Note on wires in pictures: Speaker wire is the gray wire, whereas the electrical Romex is white.

I'm going to guess that the electrician installed the wiring, partly because the same kind of Romex staples were used for all of the cables, other than the skinny yellow one. Electricians generally don't know or care that their wiring can and often will introduce interference in AV and control cabling, but in their attempt to get a piece of the pie, they tell people they can do the work and don't know how to charge properly for that work, which makes builders happy because they charge less. One thing you may want to check is the Romex staples on any Category cables (yours looks like Cat5e)- those are usually hammered onto the cable and if it pinches Category cable, it can cause problems with speed and bandwidth.

I would worry less about the speaker cables than hammered Cat5e, but it's not best practice- sometimes, it can't be avoided.

Amplifiers are installed in racks all the time- that doesn't cause problems unless sensitive cabling and devices are installed to close to the amp/receiver's power supply transformer, or if low quality HDMI cables are used and IR or universal remote control hubs and their emitters are very close. HDMI cables can throw off a lot of RF. Distance in meters doesn't matter, usually.

 

[Quantum Noisemaker]

Sorry for the delayed reply, life happened and pulled me away from this project for a bit. Much thanks to Eppie, BMXTRIX and highfigh for their input here and taking some time out of their day to help out a new person to the audiophile world. It’s been super helpful with my planning and parts selection.

The first and last photo look ok to me. You have a few inches of separation. Not fond of the 3rd photo in-wall with the cables right next to each other. Maybe you can cut an opening top and bottom and separate the cables a bit.
━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━
If the central vac and pump are a few metres away I would not be too concerned unless they are old and there is a chance that the brushes on the motor are causing sparks. Doesn't sound likely in your case. You want the central vac and pump to be on separate circuits (breakers) from your audio gear. These are often on their own breakers. Most amps and receivers have pretty good filtration on their power supplies, so if electrical noise is a concern, keep your interconnects short and use good quality cables (but not crazy expensive ones). My central vac is 5m from my AVR on a separate circuit and I have never experienced noise issues.

Yep, the in-wall was a concern for me, but judging from the overall feedback on this thread, it probably won't be an issue. Luckily it should be easy to move some of the run over to the opposite stud, which should help if needed.

And glad to know central vac shouldn't be much of a concern. The central vac is about 2 meters away from my rack, but it is on a separate circuit, and the wiring is all fairly new and modern.

While it is not recommended, it rarely has any impact whatsoever on the speakers that are being used. It is almost inevitable that electricians will be running wires up and down locations where speaker wires also need to be installed. It happens time and time and time again. So, speaker wires are run all the time next to romex and there is rarely any perceivable impact at all. Dimmers would be the most notorious potential problem causer in these installations as they produce an incredible amount of RF interference, but even then, they rarely impact the speakers. I REALLY wouldn't worry about it.


No, it will not. You can always use a reasonable UPS or power conditioner unit in the AV rack to help keep things as clean as possible. Likewise, ensuring you have a dedicated circuit or two for your AV equipment can help keep RF interference down. But, with decent in rack cabling and good amplifiers, you should not run into any issues. My equipment racks sit just a few feet away from my hot water heater and HVAC system in my home and it's not a big deal. Keep in mind that a central vac isn't going to be running all the time, so isn't much of an issue even if it were to cause some noise in the system when it was on, which is still unlikely.

Yes, I would have tried to have run those speaker wires at least towards the bottom edge of the joist away from the electrical wiring, but as it stands, I wouldn't worry all that much about it. If you are really concerned, you can always hook up a speaker and a decent amp and see if there is any noise that is audible. I wouldn't expect it though.

In my experience, the quality of the whole house amplifiers is far more of an impact to the system than almost anything else.

For reference in my home: https://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/so-here-we-go-24-a-v-zones-w-10-sources.83272/

"I REALLY wouldn't worry about it." - Noted, thank you!

Thanks for linking to your home setup. It's a very helpful reference and absolutely stunning. Will definitely be taking notes on cable management from you. I think I'll be going with a simpler approach for my amp and home setup. To try to make it as seamless as possible for my folks, I want a really good Bluetooth audio solution that would also allow local network streaming from a NAS. I settled on Bluesound and their BluOS, as they seem to have the best NAS and general streaming support on the market. Going to use multiple Bluesound Powernodes, 1 for each zone, and then allow airplay 2 or the BluOS app to handle multi-zone playback. Surprisingly, getting multiple separate Bluesound Powernodes isn't much more expensive than a multi-zone amplifier. I looked into using a multi-zone amplifier with a Bluesound Node, but having to use a separate remote to select multi-zone audio would add additional complexity (and likely a lost remote). However, I could definitely be missing something, so if anyone has a better solution, please let me know!

I still have to select the in-wall speakers to pair with the system, but it would probably make sense to start a dedicated thread for that. But if folks have suggestions, I'm definitely open to them (trying not to break the bank too hard, so probably $500 - $600 max for a speaker would be a good bet.)

I'm going to guess that the electrician installed the wiring, partly because the same kind of Romex staples were used for all of the cables, other than the skinny yellow one. Electricians generally don't know or care that their wiring can and often will introduce interference in AV and control cabling, but in their attempt to get a piece of the pie, they tell people they can do the work and don't know how to charge properly for that work, which makes builders happy because they charge less. One thing you may want to check is the Romex staples on any Category cables (yours looks like Cat5e)- those are usually hammered onto the cable and if it pinches Category cable, it can cause problems with speed and bandwidth.

I would worry less about the speaker cables than hammered Cat5e, but it's not best practice- sometimes, it can't be avoided.

Amplifiers are installed in racks all the time- that doesn't cause problems unless sensitive cabling and devices are installed to close to the amp/receiver's power supply transformer, or if low quality HDMI cables are used and IR or universal remote control hubs and their emitters are very close. HDMI cables can throw off a lot of RF. Distance in meters doesn't matter, usually.

I believe you are correct, looks like the electrician did it, as the staples used are the same as on the Romex. Luckily, the gray wires in the picture that look like ethernet are the speaker wires, and the black wires are coax. Whoever did the cat5e actually ran all the runs into the frame of the house, and none are exposed in the basement (annoying from a maintenance/wire pulling perspective, but very cleanly done besides that). They were originally terminated with rj-11 for phones, but I've re-terminated them with rj-45 jacks and have been able to run 1 gigabit on all of them. I saw one point where the staple was pinching the speaker wire, but besides that the rest seem good.

Luckily the rack I am using is just network and audio, so not planning any HDMI runs from it. Just cat5e ethernet, coax and speaker as of now. Should I separate out the speaker wire from the cat5e lines?

━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━

One final note, as mentioned in my first post, the original install ran the speaker wires to a closed off cabinet on the first floor, and not to the basement where I have a nice rack set up (it's nice and cool down there year round). After reading all your advice, I've been considering keeping these connections usable rather than completely re-routing them. For this, I'm considering wiring a speaker selection switch like this into the run in reverse, to make it work like a source selection switch. This would mean that if there was ever a need to put AV equipment in that cabinet, I could just flip a switch to change the source from basement rack to cabinet. Is this a sensible thing to do, and would it have any negative effects on the signal quality?

Once again, thanks for all your input and advice, it's extremely helpful to have forums and folks like you when diving into a new domain.

 

[highfigh]

And glad to know central vac shouldn't be much of a concern. The central vac is about 2 meters away from my rack, but it is on a separate circuit, and the wiring is all fairly new and modern.

I believe you are correct, looks like the electrician did it, as the staples used are the same as on the Romex. Luckily, the gray wires in the picture that look like ethernet are the speaker wires, and the black wires are coax. Whoever did the cat5e actually ran all the runs into the frame of the house, and none are exposed in the basement (annoying from a maintenance/wire pulling perspective, but very cleanly done besides that). They were originally terminated with rj-11 for phones, but I've re-terminated them with rj-45 jacks and have been able to run 1 gigabit on all of them. I saw one point where the staple was pinching the speaker wire, but besides that the rest seem good.

Luckily the rack I am using is just network and audio, so not planning any HDMI runs from it. Just cat5e ethernet, coax and speaker as of now. Should I separate out the speaker wire from the cat5e lines?

━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━ ━

One final note, as mentioned in my first post, the original install ran the speaker wires to a closed off cabinet on the first floor, and not to the basement where I have a nice rack set up (it's nice and cool down there year round). After reading all your advice, I've been considering keeping these connections usable rather than completely re-routing them. For this, I'm considering wiring a speaker selection switch like this into the run in reverse, to make it work like a source selection switch. This would mean that if there was ever a need to put AV equipment in that cabinet, I could just flip a switch to change the source from basement rack to cabinet. Is this a sensible thing to do, and would it have any negative effects on the signal quality?

Once again, thanks for all your input and advice, it's extremely helpful to have forums and folks like you when diving into a new domain.

Central vac usually has a cable with two wires at each port, just so the hose fitting will activate the switch to turn the vacuum on. It's not high current, not AC and won't cause any interference.

If the speaker cable is pinched, I would pry the staple off just enough to eliminate the pinch. As long as they didn't pound it too hard, it shouldn't be a problem but I would absolutely check the resistance between the wires before the walls are closed, in case it's shorting.

Any time additional connections are made, it risks causing problems. If the basement rack is only a possibility and not actually planned, it would probably be better to run enough cables to make the switch in the future and leave them alone now, or install a conduit to allow feeding the cables in the future- conduit is a lot less expensive than speaker cable.

Ideally, cables carrying current should always be separated from low level signal cables but sometimes, it's hard to avoid. Higher voltage speaker runs, like what's in a 70V system (not usually used in residential, but can't be ruled out completely), should be separated from analog line level AV runs and HDMI should be kept away if the signal cables are run on parallel paths, but if they cross, make sure to do it at or close to a right angle.

In the real world, it's not always possible to avoid running several types of cabling in the same bundle. If the runs aren't extremely long and if the shielding is good on the cables that are shielded, you shouldn't have any problems. I have seen multiple bundles of Crestron and Lutron control cables running parallel to AV, voice and data cable bundles in large installations and they didn't cause problems.

 

[Quantum Noisemaker]

Central vac usually has a cable with two wires at each port, just so the hose fitting will activate the switch to turn the vacuum on. It's not high current, not AC and won't cause any interference.

If the speaker cable is pinched, I would pry the staple off just enough to eliminate the pinch. As long as they didn't pound it too hard, it shouldn't be a problem but I would absolutely check the resistance between the wires before the walls are closed, in case it's shorting.

Any time additional connections are made, it risks causing problems. If the basement rack is only a possibility and not actually planned, it would probably be better to run enough cables to make the switch in the future and leave them alone now, or install a conduit to allow feeding the cables in the future- conduit is a lot less expensive than speaker cable.

Ideally, cables carrying current should always be separated from low level signal cables but sometimes, it's hard to avoid. Higher voltage speaker runs, like what's in a 70V system (not usually used in residential, but can't be ruled out completely), should be separated from analog line level AV runs and HDMI should be kept away if the signal cables are run on parallel paths, but if they cross, make sure to do it at or close to a right angle.

In the real world, it's not always possible to avoid running several types of cabling in the same bundle. If the runs aren't extremely long and if the shielding is good on the cables that are shielded, you shouldn't have any problems. I have seen multiple bundles of Crestron and Lutron control cables running parallel to AV, voice and data cable bundles in large installations and they didn't cause problems.

Thanks for these details highfigh, definitely helps with planning some of my possible cable runs. Loosened the staple as you suggested, but it was only a minor pinch, so likely no issues.

To clarify, the walls are already closed sadly (The house was built in the early 2000's). If I had a choice I'd definitely run entirely new wires to each possible amp location, but since most of the wiring is behind drywall now, this would be time-consuming. The only space the cords are exposed is in the basement, which is why I came up with my somewhat jank speaker selection switch idea.