A few weeks ago I picked up a surround sound system on Craigslist. It came with some pretty thin speaker wire, (24 gauge I think) but the guy said it worked fine for him. I had enough of my own 16g wire to connect the front and center speakers, but not enough to connect the rears.
With what I had left after wiring the front and center speakers, I ran
2 lengths of 16g down into the basement, across the ceiling and back up into the living room, where I attached them (securely) to the 24g for the rear speakers. I'd guess 15' of 24g for the right rear speaker and 25' for the left. The wires ran next to each through the basement, up into the living room, along one wall and then parted ways in a corner, with one going up to the right rear and the other continuing along the floor to the other side of the room and then up to the left rear speaker.What I found was that both rear speakers would sort of crackel if I turned the volume up too high. Low volumes were fine, but I couldn't crank it up. It wasn't really distortion of the sound itself, as much as a high pitched tick-tick-tick on top of the sound. I actually narrowed it down to the left rear speaker wire as the root cause, the one with the longest wire run of 24g wire. As long as that length of wire was hooked up, both rear speakers would crackle at high volume. If I plugged one of the 16g wires to the front speakers into the left rear jack on the system, there was no crackling. If I unplugged the left rear and ran just the right rear, there was no crackling. That tells me that the noise was definitely related to that run of wire.
This weekend I bought enough 16g wire to rewire both rear speakers, each with it's own single run of wire from the system to the speaker. No more crackling even when cranked up loud enough to send the cat running from the room.
So, to all you would be sound engineers, I ask this simple question:
Why would a small gauge wire running to that one speaker cause both rear speakers to crackel? Yes, originally there was small gauge wire running to both rear speakers, but as I said, when I unplugged the longest length of 24g to the left speaker, the right speaker stopped crackling.
What would cause that type of problem?