I used cheap speaker wire to connect my computer to a stereo 100ft away and now I get background noise. Why?
I bought a 100ft roll of speaker wire, and the corresponding stereo/rca plug ends to hook up the computer to the stereo so we could get internet radio. Besides the cable... is there anything else that could cause the background noise. I think the connections are good enough... they aren't soldiered yet, but I wasn't going to unless they work.
Could it be the signal strength? I'm using the rca plugs to connect to the aux connections in the stereo. If so, are there filters/amplifiers available?
You can't use speaker wire because it's not shielded. Check out http://www.bcae1.com/rcacable.htm. The outside shielding is grounded and prevents noise from leaking into the main signal. With speaker wire you don't get this shielding. And since line level signals are unamplified, it doesn't take much noise to cause interference. Plus you're going 100 ft, so there's a good chance you're picking something up. It could even by the "hum" of the 60 Hz AC power.
What you want to do is to get 2 spools of 100 ft of coax cable (the kind you use to hook up your cable TV), and get a couple of F-connector-to-RCA adaptors (http://www.hometech.com/hts/products/video/connectors/adaptors/index.html) on each end.
Or you can buy bulk line-level cable (http://www.hometech.com/hts/products/audio/bulk_cable/line_level/index.html) but that might be harder to find.
Note that 100ft is pretty long to run line-level audio, so you might want to check out some of the amplifiers here: http://www.hometech.com/hts/products/audio/amplifiers/index.html
Good luck!
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