John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hello all,

was wondering if anyone can offer some advice (or point me to resources) on speaker cable lengths. We need to run speaker cable from our control room to 2 studio rooms so we can have guitar amp heads in the control room and speaker cabinets in the studio rooms. We will be making up wall plates with neutrik connectors as well as the 1/4 inch to neutrik cables to connect the amp heads to the corresponding wall plate channel.

we have estimated that the cables lengths from the control room wall plate to the main live room wall plate will be around 12 meters, so once we factor in the cable coming from the amp head (to control room wall plate) and cable going to cabinet (from live room wall plate to cabinet) we could be looking at 16, 17 meters total, possibly more depending on where we put the cabinets (and wall plates) in the main live room which is fairly big (approx 4 x 8 meters).

We will also be doing the same with standard balanced 1/4inch cables just to have as spares/backups for sends/returns and other possible unforeseen duties.

Do cable runs of this length ( particularly the speaker cables) pose any possible problems? The owner of the studio wants to run the speaker cable along the same route as the already installed mic tie line/stage box, but after reading the FAQ here i will recommend we take another route with these cables.

thanks and hope all is well.

If you use decent gauge cable, that shouldn't be a problem. I sometimes have to run cables much longer than that for live sound. Speaker cables carry pretty high voltage, so there's no issue with interference getting in, but if the copper is too thin, or the impedance is not good, then you can have large losses along the cable, or loos some clarity, but over a few meters, I doubt it will be much of an issue.

However, I wouldn't run those cables close to mic cables. Keep them apart.

And better yet, just run line level signals to the rooms, and put the amps along with the speakers, in the rooms. Much better all around.

- Stuart -

Do you know what impedance you need? I would suggest probably 12 AWG and running it in rigid conduit to shield/reduce any unwanted noise.