Banana Plugs to subwoofer (RCA) conversion

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Hello All,

I'm doing a house renovation and building all the cabling in to walls to keep things nice and tidy. The AV Receiver is located under the stairs and terminates in to an audio patch panel in a small server rack. The speaker cabling then runs through the walls and ends up as small plates with banana plugs where the speakers will go.

As a subwoofer uses a single cable with single connector at each end, I kind of expected the plates where the subs will plug in to have a single RCA connector on the wall so that I can use a sub lead from the wall plate to the subs. Instead, I have banana plugs which has speaker cable running through the walls back to the patch panel.

He informs me...and I have no reason not to believe him, that I can essentially make a cable that has 2 banana plugs on one end and a single sub connector on the other end (I'm not using LFE).

Having a look on the internet, I have found one or two examples of these types of cable, but it's been few and far between.

My first question is:

Can I use speaker cable with the necessary converters at either end to run a sub? I will obviously need a single sub connector from the amp to a pair on banana plugs on the patch panel and then at the other end, a pair of banana plugs going in to a sub connector.

My second question is:

Has anybody done this or bought cables of this type? I'm happy making them, so if in principal this all works, I dare say I'll make something up rather than buy anything so I can bespoke it to my needs.

Many thanks

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Thanks guys, that’s exactly what I was hoping to hear. I do happen to have two brand new unused sub cables asking to be chopped up so will most definitely use those and add banana plugs to the other end. Both runs should be quite short as the sub will be positioned right by the socket on the wall so will only be 50cm or so and the amp end is about 1.5 metres from the audio patch so will be fairly short that end.

Thank you!!

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Yes, that’s exactly the setup. One thing that has been considered is that the speaker cables are in completely separate runs and away from power cables for that very reason

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I prefer Red997’s response to be honest 😀

I’m fairly close to testing it all, I’m doing the Server rack end of business at the moment, so will update. If it fails miserably, I will of course lie, say it’s the best thing ever and quietly rip cables out and redo it quickly 😀

I’ll report back in soon!

Thanks for your responses

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TonyRPH said:

Am I the only one who gets annoyed when an OP doesn't provide us with thread closure?

Oh well...

I'd not forgotten! My partner has selfishly been in hospital so has completely wrecked my plans to finish my install. Women eh!!

I will most definitely give an update but won't get a chance to do anything until the weekend as I'm up to my neck in work this week. The electrician working on my house is going to be there on Thursday and Friday so was hoping to have this all done by now so that I could get him to feed some new shielded cable and swap the banana plug sockets over to RCA if required. I'm quite tempted to get him to do it anyway without testing but don't feel that will give the right closure for this thread

I'll update soon!!

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Well I’ve finally had some time at home to do a few jobs! The speakers all seem to work ok when plugged in to the speaker connects, so I made a few leads to convert an RCA at one end to a set of banana plugs at the other.

I wasn’t 100% sure what I was doing so found a video on YouTube which showed the cable being opened up, the core being used at the positive and the outer wire used as the negative. There is a possibility I didn’t get the cables right, but I’m pretty certain I did.

So what was the end result? Well, the sub works and I have two locations I can patch it to.

The downside is that is is absolutely unusable! As some of you predicted, the hum coming through the sub is pretty noticeable. It’s not even a background noise, you can hear it outside the room and is no good! I currently have a very long RCA cable running from under the stairs to the sub in the living room and it’s fine, so is very cut and dry as to what the problem is.

I’ll see the sparky soon and give him the good news that he has some work to do 😀

Apart from this, I’m really pleased I’ve gone to the effort of building the cables in. It looks really neat. I need to finish the install off under the stairs but that won’t take long to do as I just need to find something to put gadgets on and position the IR sensors so remotes still work ok.

Would I do this again? Erm, yes I would! It really is utter ball ache and has taken a long time, but it’s very satisfying to see 30cm of speaker cable between a wall plate and a speaker.

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gizlaroc said:

That is your issue with the hum, they are acting like and aerial picking up all the interference.

Can you not just take the wall plates off, get a sub cable, and use the old speaker cable to pull it through? So you have a proper sheilded 75ohm cable there instead?

Edited by gizlaroc on Friday 3rd January 16:53

This is exactly what I shall be doing! I thought I'd actually posted this but obviously not. The cable goes up the wall in to the ceiling above, through the ceiling (The floor in the room above is still up at the moment), then it comes down the wall in to the under stairs cupboard, so as it all runs in straight lines and is fairly accessible, it shouldn't be too difficult to use the speaker cable to pull through!