Newbie question: Speaker wire to RCA Phono help please?

[Bernie Steakous]

Hello,

Complete newbie here looking for advice. I've been searching the site and google in general, but I guess my search terms are too general to find exactly what I'm looking for.

When we moved in we had our living room wired behind the skirting boards for our 5.1 system, seemed like a good idea at the time and looks very neat.

However, we've moved things around I need a subwoofer to go where a speaker once stood. The speaker had "regular" Maplins speaker wire going to it.

The cable I need for the sub is a one Male RCA Phono plug (at the amp side) to two male RCA Phono plug cable.

I tried the easiest route of pulling the correct, ready made cable through with the speaker wire, but it's too tight and snags/gets stuck, so that's out of the question.

What I'd really like to know is it possible to either attache a male phono at each end of the speaker cable (and buy a y-piece splitter for the subwoofer end), or even better, some how split the signal myself and fit a single male RCA at one end and two male RCA at the other?



As an afterthought, if there's anyway to do this WITHOUT welding that would be even better, as I just dont have the hands or mind to do that without burning either myself or some other close by object (not good in the living room!).

Thanks in advance.

[richie00boy]

Yes you could put a phono plug on easy enough, + to pin, - to screen. You might have a slight hum issue but you will just have ti see how it goes. If it's bad you might be able to use thinner screened wire and pull it through - how thick wire were you trying to pull when you couldn't manage it?

[AndrewT]

Hi,
welding would be excellent but I think you mean soldering.

The lower temperature of about 300degC still burns everything around it but most can learn the skill, safely, without needing asbestos gloves.

[Bernie Steakous]

Yeah, I meant soldering, not had much sleep lately!

Do those "cold soldering" devices you see promoted on TV actually work?

Anyway, I've just about managed to fit some suitable cable around msot of the skirting and it'll do for now at least!

If I want to have a single phono at one end, and two at the other, how do I split it? Just split the + and - half and half between the two phono plugs?

[richie00boy]

Easiest would be a Y-adapter as otherwise you would have to add sleeving to the bare spilt wired.

Cold solder "as seen on TV"? Like most "as seen on TV" products in fallout leaflets etc, dog poo is probably similarly as effective.

[Bernie Steakous]

Thanks again.

[Schaef]

A quick suggestion, most subwoofer plate amps sum the two line level inputs after doing a low pass on the individual channels, so you should be okay just connecting a single RCA to the sub. No need to get a splitter. At the very least, it won't hurt anything to try hooking up just one connector and seeing what happens.

As to the cold heat solder thingys, I hear they work, for what they show it doing on TV, namely simple things, but for sensitive components, it'll kill them. (mainly surface mount stuff) So, for your soldering a connector to the wires, it'd probably work, but for soldering up boards, you're better off with a real iron. Personally, if I were you, I'd pick up a cheapy Radio Shack pencil iron for $10 or less, a little bit of solder and away you go. Its cheaper than the cold heat things and you'll have it right now.

[sreten]

Hi,

As said there is no point using a splitter. The sub amplifier simply
sums the inputs back to mono, and as your starting with a mono
feed you would be wasting your time. Simply use one input.

/sreten.

[tlparker]

Actually, they work quite well. You need to be careful around areas where running a very high amperage current for a a very short period of time might do some harm, as that's what they're doing. If you look at the tip of the solderer, you'll see it's split, one cathode, one anode, so you're basically sending a lightening bolt across a very short distance for a very short time. I keep one in my general purpose toolkit for small fixes here and there. It's nicely transportable (great for work on the car radio, etc.) and doens't way anything. Down/upside is that you can't control the temp, but then it takes absoltely 0 time to heat up (hate sitting there for those whole 30 seconds waiting for my bench warmer to get to 2500 just to solder one on little amp wire). Don't know about an empirical "stuff that works on TV" actually does study, but in this case, I'd say "yup".