I have a customer with a townhome that has WH audio prewired in three locations. At the home run there is also a TV and a phone (family room home run). He wants to look at adding an outdoor pair as well. Problem is without a lot of holes there is no way... unless I can utilize the cat5..

I am going to use 1 pair for an IR emitter so I will only have three pair and really I was going to use one other pair for antenna if I couldn't get a good enough signal at the receiver. so at worst I will have 2 pair from the cat5 to run a pair of speakers up.. Anyone done this? It is a townhome so the patio is small. But we are using Polk Atrium 55's from his old house.
I guess I could go into the warehouse and run some cat5 for a pair of outdoors and see what happens..

ericstac,

have run speakers many times in the past on cat-5, when left with no other options, and customers wouldn't pay for proper retro

not the greatest solution, but it works just fine

Don't do it.

Consider taking the fixed out from the receiver, running into a pair of baluns and converting to cat 5. At a logical location inside the house, convert back to line level and install a small amplifer. Send the speaker wire out from there to your vc, to your speakers, and life is good.

Otherwise, No bass.

Fred's solution is the best.

But

There are two problems with running speaker voltage down CAT5. One is that you have to run a hefty amount of current to a speaker, and it is possible under HUGE volume conditions to get the wire hot. This is kept in check by the other problem, resistance.

The resistance of the CAT5 is much greater than that of speaker wire. The net result is less volume out than put in, but also much less control of the woofer.

Speakers are motors, and once a woofer starts moving, part of what stops it is the very low impedance of the amplifier's output and the speaker wire. When the voltage is removed, this near-short acts to stop the motion of the woofer. The concept of the source's low impedance damping extraneous motion of the woofer is called damping factor.

With CAT5, the higher resistance will let the woofer move tiny a bit after the voltage has stopped, which also means the woofer will not move exactly in accordance with the signal from the amp. Audio will come out as a result of this extraneous motion. Audio that differs from the voltage put in is called distortion. Distortion is bad.

Will it be audible? Maybe. Maybe not. If it were a stereo pair for critical listening, it might sound muddy or the left-right and all other imaging would be smeared. Drum hits would not sound as crisp as they should. Is it for the surround speakers and your main unit is a home theater in a box? Wire away; nobody will hear the difference!

Use an Abus or SOnance Amplified Volume control.

With Abus, you can still run IR back to the system, Dunno about the Sonance, but its probobly. Low wattage, but its pretty clean and should run fine.

Yes, Fred's solution is the best. If you don't want to spend the loot on the baluns, at least utilize all of the conductors in the CAT5 for maximum current carrying ability. Another solution would be to use 70 volt speakers and a 70 volt amp. The CAT5 wire would be fine for that application. But by the time you did that, it would be less costly to use the baluns and a discrete amp.

It sounds to me like it was pre-wired for the abus system. Look into that. Also I have, at some points, had to hook up speakers to cat 5 (Not under my own free-will.) I noticed no difference with sound quality, but we were using low end inwalls, and it was just for background music.

Mike

I have done this using the Abus solution.
Client added another area that had a previous cat5 phone run to. Worked like a charm, he just lost phone capabilities at that location.

Here is what I was planning on doing. The Cat5 runs from the first floor to the second and into an OnQ can. I can get wire into the can so what I was going to do is run speaker level to the can and from there run 16/2 to the speakers. The Cat5 is estimated at about 30 ft. and then there will be about 40ft of 16/2 for each speaker.. So will the restriction of the Cat5 permanently restrict the current going to the speakers.. or will the opening up into 16 guage allow a little correction?

30 feet. If you twist tow of the pairs together for the hot, and the other two for the negative, it will be fine. Will there be some loss, of course, but will it be significant enough to ruin your day, I doubt it.