Question about running speaker wire.....

[illwill84]

I am in the process of hooking up a 4 channel amp in my car.
I am going to run new speaker wire to all four speakers, and I was wondering if there is anything that I should advoid when running the wires for the speakers.

I know that you need to keep the RCA cables and the power cable seperate, but what about the speaker wire? Do you need to keep the speaker wires away from the power wire? Do you need to keep them away from eachother?

Any feedback would be GREATLY appreciate.

Thanks!

 

[Poseur]

are you intending to run speaker wire all the way to doors? or simply from your amp to the harness behind the deck? if doors, check here... http://www.msprotege.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90091 but really I wouldn't bother with that for 4-ch amp kind of power to your door sunless you're doing something huge... and at that, Allow me to push for saving that 4ch money an djust getting some nice front speakers powered offof an amp..

 

[Poseur]

oh, and to answer your question... ideally, yes you'e want to avoid all other wires with your speker wires, but in reality, as long as you can keep them mostly away form the power you're fine, even at that, they're much less prone to interferance than rca's. Alot of the problems ppl think they have with noise actually comes from an imporper ground. So start there.

 

[Sir Nuke]

As stated...seriously consider what you are doing here....unless you are going to be pushing more than 75 watts per channel (speaker)....you are wasting your time and money running new speaker wires....sure the stock wires look little...but they will easily handle up to 75 watts.

As for seperation....keep the power to your amp seperated from the speaker wires....its okay if all the speaker wires are bundled together....

example...I mounted my amp under the drivers seat....the power runs down the door sill....the amp is grounded to one of the seat anchors....the speaker inputs to the amp ( or your RCA's) run down and through the console to the amp and then back out to the speakers via the console back to behind the deck and then out to the doors.

 

[illwill84]

I picked up some kenwood exlcelon speakers (6x8 in front doors, and 6x9 in the back shelf thing).

I have a 4 channel Rockford Fosgate amp which is advertised as pushing 50x4, but was tested at 71x4.

Would new speaker wire be a waste of time?

I have speaker wire just sitting around, so money isn't the issue here.

And yes, I was considering running it all the way up to the doors.

Thanks for all the advice!

 

[GRMYSZN]

I just had my installer friend run new speaker wire for me when he was putting in my amp and speakers. He said he did it just because the factory wire was so small with what I plan to do in the future he didn't want any fires starting. He didn't charge me for it so I didn't care either way but it took him a good 6 hrs to do everything.

 

[chuyler1]

Fires starting due to speaker wire?

hah, that's the first I heard that one.

Won't happen unless you stick the leads in a bucket of gasoline. Lets pretend that you did have some exposed copper in the factory wiring (which is very unlikely unless your car is 10-20 years old or you have field mice that like to chew on your cables). As soon as that copper either touches the frame of the car or the other lead, you might get a spark if you were cranking your tunes but then the impedence would drop and the amp would either fry or go into protection mode. There just isn't enough current to cause a fire.

 

[GRMYSZN]

Fires starting due to speaker wire?

hah, that's the first I heard that one.

Won't happen unless you stick the leads in a bucket of gasoline. Lets pretend that you did have some exposed copper in the factory wiring (which is very unlikely unless your car is 10-20 years old or you have field mice that like to chew on your cables). As soon as that copper either touches the frame of the car or the other lead, you might get a spark if you were cranking your tunes but then the impedence would drop and the amp would either fry or go into protection mode. There just isn't enough current to cause a fire.

Didn't really care if it were true or not, he did it for free and that's all I care about.

 

[illwill84]

Well,
That was a fun project to say the least.

I ran speaker wire from my amp (trunk mounted) to all 4 speakers.

Not to ask a dumb question, but how would you go about hooking up speaker wire any other way to the front speakers?

I was kind of weary about cutting into the stock wires just with the fear of either cutting the wrong wire, of having having a pain in the ass when it was time to go back to stock.

 

[chuyler1]

You can use splicers...
http://www.msprotege.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=19376
However, this was to use the factory unit with a LOC.