Hello all,
I am in the somewhat unique (and very fortunate) position of building a house right now, however by the end of this week it will be drywalled so any wiring that I want to do needs to be complete soon (hence the 'time sensitive' part of the question).
In my downstairs living room I've already pre-wired for an overhead projector system, including 25' of Monster's best component cable and an equally long VGA cable. I also wanted to pre-wire for 5.1 surround and have already done so using "Monster Standard THX SP THX Certified 16 gauge speaker cable with duraflex protective jacket," however I have a couple of questions related to my setup before they drywall the house and I can't change anything:
1) How good (or not) is the speaker cable I chose? I realize that there are thicker cables out there, but keep in mind that my final system I will have in place will be around $2,000 (including receiver), and I'm definitely not a big-time audiophile but I can appreciate clean, good sounding music. They had other cable there but at the time I felt that I would be getting diminishing returns by buying $250 worth of speaker wire for the level of system I will be installing (I paid $60 for 200 ft).
2) For my center channel should I run two speaker wires in case I want to double feed (not sure what the correct term is) the center channel speaker? My girlfriend's system has two separate speaker wires going into her center channel speaker, so the thought occurred to me that maybe I should go ahead and run 4 lines to the box for the center/left/right rather than just 3.
3) For what it's worth I've always liked Polk Audio speakers, and probably will use them again. I realize that there is better out there but to me they sound awfully good, and are within my budget. I went ahead and bought a pair of RC55i in-wall speakers that I will mount in the ceiling as rear channel speakers over the couch when everything is complete. They seem like they will be absolutely more than adequate serving as rear-channel speakers, any thoughts/input on this (I can still return them if need be)...? My goal is to buy a $500-700 Harmon Kardon receiver, a $300-400 JBL subwoofer and the remaining $1000-1200 on two tower side channel and center channel Polk Audio speakers. Does this sound like a decent route to take for basic H/T needs?
4) Finally, I'm running all the cables up the stud on the wall, through the ceiling and down the other wall where my speakers will be. I've read the sticky and saw that I should try to further isolate the speaker wire from AC power lines with rubber hose--I did the best I could by routing the speaker wire as far as possible from AC lines, but of course there's only so much you can do. Any advice on this? All the speaker wires are running in a group together through the walls, they won't interfere with each other will they? I'm hoping that the cable I bought will be pretty well shielded, and while it's a little late now I could, if absolutely necessary, re-wire with different cable.
Sorry about the long post and thanks in advance for all your responses!
