No time to read all this……..but I did catch the “no need to run conduit” part.
Run the dam conduit for chrissake, and you guys should stop telling people not to because you’re tight asses. Ever try to fish new wire in a finished wall because some idiot ran a screw through a conductor or a stud shifted and cut a wire??? Do it once and you’ll run conduit for the rest of your days.
Go get yourself a few rolls of non-metallic-flexible conduit from home depot. It’s that plastic blue stuff more commonly referred to as “smurf tube”. It cuts with a utility knife, bends easy by hand, utilizes snap in adaptors and J-boxes and you secure it with two hole conduit straps. You can run it in a room with a 7.1 system with extra subwoofer stub out locations in one day…..and I mean ANYONE can do it. The stuff’s idiot proof…..and best of all it’s CHEAP.
When you go to pull wire in this stuff, use a shop vacuum and suck a wadded up ball of tape attached to some string. You can’t push a fish tape through it and the shop vac trick works slick. Buy a jug of liquid hand soft and lube up the speaker wire, tie the string to it and pull away. Terminate the ends of the wires into banana jack receptacles at both ends. Stub the J-box location out to where you can run short cables from your audio processor to the boxes. You’ll have a nice finished product with the latitude to pull new stuff if you ever need it.
