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Connecting powered speakers to a sound card

Hi, I have just run cables around the house with the idea of sending audio output to various powered speakers from the PC's sound card. This works well with the shorter leads which use standard cables bought with jack plugs fitted. The longer cables are made from high quality twin speaker cable, with jack plugs fitted by me. The output from at least one channel is faint and there is also a hum heard. My question is whether this is most likely due to the fact that the speaker cables are not screened, or is it more likely that I have a bad connection in the jack plugs or other cable joints ( I have had to connect the jack plugs to a short length of thinner wire as the speaker cable is too thick)? Many thanks for any guidance, Rod

Reply to
remcg
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The line level signals travel this sort of distance through almost any kind of wire, so I doubt the weak signal is anything but a broken wire or bad connection at one end. These are rather high impedance signals, so fatter wire does little good, and increases the capacitive load across the pair and to the surroundings.

However, such signals are only a volt r so, and will pick up less competing hum when running near power lines in the walls, if they run in shielded wire. A shielded twisted pair (signal and ground in the pair) would work best, if the shield is grounded only at the receiving end (shield and ground conductor of the pair connected together at the receiving end, shield unconnected at computer end).

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Regards,

John Popelish
Reply to
John Popelish

You should be using shielded audio interconnect wire for line level audio. The shield at each end must go to the ground side of the source and destination equipment being connected. The wire should be run where it is not parallel to power wires.

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JANA _____

Reply to
JANA

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