Concealing Speaker Wire in Existing Walls

Installation Fundamentals

A good technique is to snap a chalk line across the face of the studs or against the bottom of the ceiling joists. Then work backward so that you can always see the holes you have already drilled. Paying care- ful attention to this will save you a lot of time later on!

Pulling the Cable

Pull the cable in sections (from the stereo to the volume control, from the volume con- trol to the speaker). Start with the longest sections and use left over wire to complete the short sections. If you plan to pull many rooms at the same time through a central route, walk off the distance to each destina- tion, add a generous fudge factor for turns and other obstacles, then cut off each sec- tion so that you have a bundle of wires you can pull at once.

Whenever you run the wire further than four and one half feet from a hole in a stud or joist (open attic space, going up walls, etc.), fasten the wire to the joists or studs using cable clamps or appropriately sized wire staples. The wire should not have large sags in it, nor should it be too tight. Try to protect the wire from being stepped on in attics or other unfinished crawl spaces. There are guard strips, raceways and conduits which can be used to protect the cable. Consult the local building code for special requirements in your area.

Concealing Speaker Wire in Existing Walls

This is actually a fairly simple task if you restrict your choice of speaker locations and wire routes to the ceilings or interior walls of your home. Interior walls in almost all North American residences are hollow, so it is easy to flush mount speakers into them and route new speaker cable around the house. What you see when you look at the painted wall board, plaster, or paneling is only the skin of the wall. Behind the skin

is the skeleton; two-by-four wood or metal “studs” running vertically from the floor to the ceiling in walls and two-by-six or larger “joists” running horizontally in the ceilings and floors. In between the studs and the joists is the space for the wiring and plumb- ing of your home.

Exterior walls are different. They must insu- late the house from the heat and cold out- side, so they are stuffed with insulation. The national building code requires that the hol- low wall space in exterior walls be broken by a horizontal stud placed between the vertical studs. This “fire blocking” makes it very difficult to retrofit long lengths of wire. In some areas of the country the exterior walls are constructed of solid masonry, and have no hollow space for speaker wires.

Start by examining all the possible routes you might take to run the speaker wire from the speaker to the volume control and back to the stereo. Use a stud sensor or other device to locate the internal structure of the wall. You want to avoid all studs or joists. A typical route would be: from the speaker location up the inside of the wall to a new hole drilled into the top “plate” (horizontal two-by- four at the top of the inside of the wall), into the attic crawl space, then down to the volume control location through another top plate, back up to the attic, across the attic, and finally down anoth- er plate to the wall behind the stereo sys- tem itself (See Figure 11). The other very common route is through the bot- tom plate of the wall into an unfinished basement or crawl space.