Surround sound over cat5 ?

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Sanjøy
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Surround sound over cat5 ?

Post by Sanjøy » Sat Feb 17, 2007 8:13 pm

Picking up on my surround sound thread.

Flat is cat5 all over the place with a nifty patch panel in the hall. Pretty much a dbl socket in every corner. Could I use 4 cores of the cat5 per channel for each of the surround sound speakers and crimp up some convertors ?

Simon, what guage is the cabling on the Sony setup you have ?

Cheers

SP
W213 All Terrain

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robin
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Post by robin » Sun Feb 18, 2007 11:07 am

You should not pass more than a few 100mA over CAT5 cabling - it's designed for low power use. I would guess 1A would be limit per conductor.

Even though the cable is an 8-way straight through connection, they are twisted in four pairs.

You need to identify which pairs are twisted together and then treat them as one (i.e. short them together at each end).

The cable isn't shielded so you would get all sorts of interference.

Short answer is that it might work, but I doubt you would get the power/quality you wanted.

To make it work properly you need a differential drive of some sort to properly use the twisted pairs and then a power amp at the other end so you are only sending line-level signals (1v p-p) over the cable.

Cheers,
Robin
I is in your loomz nibblin ur wirez
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