I'm looking to create a patch panel to add flexibility to my retrofit HT room (ie not new construction).
Questions:
1. Will cable lengths of 50-100' overall (eg source to speaker) be a problem?
2. Will haveing 2 additional breaks in the cable (for the patch panel) cause loss of signal quality?
3. What kind of cable should I use for the in wall runs? (Speaker cable, Coax?)
In the end a speaker run would look like
1. Reciver to wallplate,
2. Wallplate to "Local In" on patch panel
3. "Local In" -> "Local Out" in patch panel
4. "Local Out" to Spk Wall plate
5. Spk Wall plate to speaker.
Project Details:
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I'm looking to be able to locate my source equipment (DVD/Reciever/CD, HTPC) either in my equipment closet, or the HT room itself. At present our preference is to have the stuff where we can see it (in the HT room itself). However I'd like to locate the HTPC in the closet (puts out too much heat and some noise).
I have a 7.1 speaker setup (or will once I run the wires), with the addition of a 2nd pair of Surround speakers (Bi-polar).
This totals 9 pairs of speaker terminals in the HT room.
I'd like to wire for a L and R subwoofer (using line-level RCA inputs for active subs). I'd like to have component video from either the closet or the HT room, this is basically just a run from the closet to the HT room (which would facilitate TVout for the TV from the HTPC), since I could simply cable the in HT-room Reciever to the TV directly.
I see two ways of doing this:
- Patch Panel in HT-Room
(less desireable for aesthetics, but shorter cable runs if I leave equipment in HT-room))
- Patch Panel in Closet
This would result in 50-100' runs of speaker wires and sub signal wires, and a 20' run of component video.
Patch panel would have threee sections and look something like this...
Code:
(Repeat for Third colum "Remote In")
---------------------------------------------------------------
| Local In | Local Out | Remote In |
| O O L | O O L
| O O R | O O R
| O O SL | O O SL
| O O SR | O O SR
| O O SL2 | O O SL2
| O O SR2 | O O SR2
| O O BkSL | O O BkSL
| O O BkSR | O O BkSR
| ooo Cmpnt Vd |ooo Cmpnt Vd
| O Sub L | O Sub L
| O Sub R | O Sub R
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Any thoughts?
-Mettius
