Niles Audio AT8000, AT8200 manual Location, Concealing Speaker Wire Existing Walls

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 interior walls or ceil- ings of your home. Interior walls in almost all North American residences are hollow, so that 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 skele-

ton; two-by-four wood or metal “studs” running verti- cally from the floor to the ceil- ing in walls and two-by-six or larger “joists” running hori- zontally in the ceilings and floors. In between the studs and the joists is the space for the wiring and plumbing of your home.

Exterior walls are different.
They must insulate the house	Speaker
from the heat and cold out-	Location
side, so they are stuffed with
insulation. The national build-
ing code requires that the hol-
low wall space in exterior
walls be broken by a horizon-
tal stud placed between the
vertical studs. This “fire block-
ing” makes it very difficult to

retrofit long lengths of wire. In some areas of the country the exterior walls are con- structed of solid masonry, and have no hol- low space for speakers or 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 another plate to the wall behind the stereo system itself (See Figure 4). The other very common route is through the bottom plate of the wall into an unfinished basement or crawl space.

Identify where all of your electrical, phone, and TV wiring is likely to be and plan to

Volume

Control

Location

Stereo

Figure 4 Location

Installation Fundamentals

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