Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater rg6 as a subwoofer cable

anybody try or seen this used for a sub cable?-pros/cons?-i need about 45' and am considering this as a much cheaper route.Sub placement in my new house gets 3 thumbs down from the wife,she is just going to have to deal with it....the king has spoken.bahhahaha

Hey Ron the heck have you been. I started using RG6 as sub cables years ago after reading an article in a magazine about it. It's coaxial and is shielded and is you need long runs (like me) it's pretty cheap. After you put on a standard coaxial end just get the conveter from radio shack that screws into it and has an RCA end on it. Works great.

Wow! your the king of your castle? At my castle the king gets exiled to the basement when he makes HT decisions. I don't complain because that's where the theater is.

Legairre

how are you legairre?i was looking at the radio shack adapters and was a little skeptical.ill give it a try....i gotta get up there some day and check out your theater if its ok with you....see ya...ron

Do you have a powered subwoofer or not?

If it is powered, it probably doesn't matter since you will get signal to the subwoofer no matter how long the cable run is (within reason).

If it is not powered, I'd check the resistance of 45ft. You ought to be able to get the numbers for it from a cable company. It the resistance seems a little high, go to full size RG-8. Really, what you are looking for is a larger diameter center conductor.

Some folks make way too much out of cables! In my opinion, most cable advertising is just hype and has little electrical merit. Just check your physics book.

Just one man's opinion.

The Rat.

i've got the RCA brand "crimp on" rca adapters on a RG6 cable going to my sub and it works like a charm. i did have to cut off a little extra shielding and insulator to make sure i had a long enough conductor to get good electrical contact up in the plug before crimping, but i've never had a problem with it. and it's a helluva lot cheaper than getting 50' of Monster superwhammadyne THX certified subwoofer cable!!

RG 6 will work just fine and dandy. If the truth be known, most subwoofer cable of any decent quality is in fact RG 6.

I use RG6 quad shield with BNC-RCA adaptors on each end.

Was free and does the job.

Bren R.

Is there any chance one of you experts can explain the procedure to me Real Slow or point me to a good link? What tools do I need, where do I get the parts, etc. Are there pictures somewhere? I don't have experience at terminating coaxial cable ends (especially to an RCA-style plug) but have keen interest in learning more. Is there a parts/performance difference between using RG6 and RG59 for this type of thing?

Thanks in advance for your gracious assistance on my embarassingly basic question.

In reply to:

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Is there a parts/performance difference between using RG6 and RG59 for this type of thing?

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Coaxial cable is notoriously hard to terminate with anything but a BNC or F connector. Collecting all the shield, twisting it together and soldering - huge pain - and if you miss one and it hits the centre lead, you get one of those hard-to-troubleshoot intermittant static experiences.

So, the easiest way is just buying a coax cable the right length (or "roll your own" if you have the tools) to an F-connector or BNC connector, get some F or BNC to RCA adaptors, and voila - sub cable.

As for RG59 vs RG6 - RG59 gets beaten up because it's older, but in this case, it'll work just fine. RG6 just extends up into the higher bandwidth area with less rolloff - which is important for satellite (the data communication between box and dish) and some digital cable, but for analog audio, RG59 is plenty good enough.

Bren R.

Check here. The tools have links to instructions.

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