Cat-5e as Speaker wire?

[jknhouston]

A friend of mine gave me a 1000 ft roll of Inside wiring cat 5e general purpose type CM, 4 pair, 24 AWG ( solid copper ), polyethylene insulated wire........

I will have 6 zones set up, useing 5" in-wall/celling speakers, rate at 100 watts RMS to 200 watts max.....

not sure if this wire would work for this appication, or should I go with the 16gauge wire I just purchashed off e-bay?

 

[Takeereasy]

A bunch of guys on the forum are doing this right now. One of the members (Mudcat) has some really nice cables made this way. Here's a link to one of the threads: http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15282

There are several pics in the thread, very nice looking and there is also a lot of technical info about the high quality of this type of home made speaker wire in other sections of the site. Look for the speaker cable shootout.

 

[sholling]

Lamp cord or speaker cable.

http://monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10239&style=

 

[JonBaker99]

Just buy some speaker cable. Yes you could techincally run speakers off of Cat5E and I'm sure with some good engineering it could even work well. But for the price of 16/2 and 16/4 or even 14 guage why bother? I could make just about any low voltage item run off of Cat5e with the right adapter but I'd just rather run the right cable in the first place. If you are prewiring you get one shot to do it right and a lifetime of misery if you do it wrong.

 

[Buckeyefan 1]

A friend of mine gave me a 1000 ft roll of Inside wiring cat 5e general purpose type CM, 4 pair, 24 AWG ( solid copper ), polyethylene insulated wire........

I will have 6 zones set up, useing 5" in-wall/celling speakers, rate at 100 watts RMS to 200 watts max.....

not sure if this wire would work for this appication, or should I go with the 16gauge wire I just purchashed off e-bay?

If you've got 6 zones, you may have runs longer than 60'. I'm pretty sure you'll want at least 14awg for those longer runs. You can start braiding the cat5e wires, but it may take you the better part of this fall to get 6 zones completed.

Check out this thread for which awg to use for a specified distance. It's a page or so down.

Maximum Wire Lengths For TWO CONDUCTOR Copper Wire:
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm#wiretable

 

[mtrycrafts]

A friend of mine gave me a 1000 ft roll of Inside wiring cat 5e general purpose type CM, 4 pair, 24 AWG ( solid copper ), polyethylene insulated wire........

I will have 6 zones set up, useing 5" in-wall/celling speakers, rate at 100 watts RMS to 200 watts max.....

not sure if this wire would work for this appication, or should I go with the 16gauge wire I just purchashed off e-bay?

I suppose that this installation is for background music?

I don't see anything wrong with using that free cable. One run of 4pr to each speaker, connecting 2 pr to one terminal and 2 pr to the other will give you 18ga wire. You don't need optimal cables for such installations and that 'free' cable will be fine.

 

[sholling]

Just break down and use quality speaker cable. No the marketing heavy Monster kind, but for siz zones I'd sped the few bucks and run the 14ga from monoprice.com.