OT - Speaker Wire, Crackling Speakers

DerbyDad03 · 2012-11-19T20:48:22+00:00

A few weeks ago I picked up a surround sound system on Craigslist. Itcame with some pretty thin speaker wire, (24 gauge I think) but theguy said it worked fine for him. I had enough of my own 16g wire toconnect the front and center speakers, but not enough to connect therears.With what I had left after wiring the front and center speakers, I ran2 lengths of 16g down into the basement, across the ceiling and backup into the living room, where I attached them (securely) to the 24gfor the rear speakers. I'd guess 15' of 24g for the right rear speakerand 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 acorner, with one going up to the right rear and the other continuingalong the floor to the other side of the room and then up to the leftrear speaker.What I found was that both rear speakers would sort of crackel if Iturned the volume up too high. Low volumes were fine, but I couldn'tcrank it up. It wasn't really distortion of the sound itself, as muchas a high pitched tick-tick-tick on top of the sound. I actuallynarrowed it down to the left rear speaker wire as the root cause, theone with the longest wire run of 24g wire. As long as that length ofwire 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 leftrear jack on the system, there was no crackling. If I unplugged theleft rear and ran just the right rear, there was no crackling. Thattells 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 catrunning 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 bothrear speakers to crackel? Yes, originally there was small...