Rear surrounds via CAT5 wiring?

[TwinDad]

Greetings,

6 years ago we had five CAT5 outlets installed in our apartment. One in the bedroom and four in the family room. What is CAT5 and how can I use it for audio purposes? Can I somehow hook up rear surround speakers via CAT5?

Thanks,

Eddie

[budgetaudio76]

Greetings,

6 years ago we had five CAT5 outlets installed in our apartment. One in the bedroom and four in the family room. What is CAT5 and how can I use it for audio purposes? Can I somehow hook up rear surround speakers via CAT5?

Thanks,

Eddie


basicaly it is very thin wire. im not sure what it would amount to if you connect all the wires together in one cable. if you got it just lying around and alot of it, and your not going to use it for your computer. its worth a try. but make sure you use one cable for both positive and negative terminals. basically it is low voltage wiring. let us know how it turned out
:o

[mlsstl]

CAT5 wiring is for ethernet computer connections. There are 8 wires in the cable (four twisted pairs) and it is usually a small gauge wire (often 24 gauge). You could certainly use such wire for speaker purposes but there were be some loss of quality due to the extra resistance from the small gauge. If this were only the rear channels you might not notice any problem.

However, your biggest problem would be that you must disconnect that section of CAT5 wiring from the rest of the CAT5 wiring if it is being used for computers (or anything else.) The output from an audio amplifier would not be a good thing for any device other than an audio speaker.

Even then, it is not good to leave the CAT5 (RJ45) jacks in place. Someone who was not aware of your special use situation might be tempted to plug in their computer. That would be an unpleasant surprise.

[nightflier]

This might help answer some questions:

http://www.venhaus1.com/diycatfivecables.html