Greetings. Apparently I was good this Christmas, because Santa brought me a new STF-2 Subwoofer to compliment my HK3480 and M60’s. Needless to say, I’m quite impressed. Since the final location for the sub will be on the other side of the room from my receiver and I want a nice neat install, I ordered some RCA keystone jacks and plan to run the subwoofer cable under the floor. While I was at it, I also ordered some banana plugs, banana jacks, and some speaker cable so that if I’m good next year, Santa might bring me the rest of the home theater setup. If that’s the case, I’ll be able to just plug in the surrounds and I’ll be good to go. Anyway, I’m looking for some advice on how to solder the RCA jacks and/or banana plugs – neither came with instructions. I’m sure that I’ve seen such guides posted before, but I couldn’t turn up anything useful though google.

Here are the RCA Jacks that ordered:
RCA Jack
I’m assuming that the center wire gets soldered to the center post, and the outer mesh wire gets twisted together and soldered to the outer post. But then again, I don’t really know what I’m doing here. Any thoughts or links?

Here are the Banana plugs:
Banana Plugs
The plugs actually separate into three pieces. The center opening of the barrel is smooth. Do I just jam the speaker wire in there fill it with some solder?

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

For the RCA jacks the center pin you see is the "hot", This is where your signal will be fed. Im guessing you have the wire already, You dont say exactly what wire your using, If its Coax you will probbably find that your having a hard time soldering the outer braid, If this is the case then your best bet will be to either get some wire that is made to be soldered or try getting either F or RCA compression plugs to put onto the coax. I doubt you'll want to go this route because you will need new keystone inserts, tools and the connectors themselves arent exactly cheap.

Assuming you can solder the RCA cable, yes one wire will go to the center pin, and the outer braid or whatever your wire has will go to the outermost pin on your connector, this is the ground.

Those bannana plugs, If theres no set screw on them then i would imagine you will need to solder them like you mentioned. Keep in mind you will need a very large soldering gun for them otherwise you wont be able to heat the entire assembly up enough to get a good solder. One of those 100/200 watt big guns would work well with this. You dont really want to use something that powerfull for the rca's but since you probbably dont want to invest in two irons it will do the job too so long as you dont end up melting it.

Thanks for the tips. At first I did try looking for the compression type RCA connectors but couldn't find any which is why I went for the solder type. The jacks themselves were quite inexpensive, so if I wind up having to purchase different ones it wouldn't be a problem. Here's the cable that I purchased.

RCA Cable

I haven't cut the ends off yet though so I don't know how it's constructed. Thanks again for the help.

yes, that is coaxial cable so you might have a hard time soldering it. The center conductor is easy to solder but the braid can be a pain sometimes.

If your already buying a terminated cable then you can just get female to female rca ends to put on there so that you can couple it to another cable. They also make keystone jacks like this.

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=091-1208

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=261-456

Yes, it was kind of a pain to solder the RCA cable. Once finished though, it seemed like a pretty solid connection. If I had it to do all over again, I probably would have tried harder to find the crimp on connectors. Thanks again for the help, Haloeb.

Now to start dreaming about the center and surrounds.

People are actually using the solder type as a screw in type, because the screw in type does't screw down far enough to secure the wire. They work very good too. Here is a how-to someone posted in the customer review for the solder type: (misspellings and all)

How to use this banana plug as twist-in type.

Here are the steps.

1. Slit the cable to seperate the two (+ve and -ve) conductors.

2. Open the banana from its rear end. The one where the red or black color strip is.

3. Remove the sheath from the conductor about alength little more than the length of the end piece of babana.

4. Twist the strands together and insert them from rear of this piece (the one with color strip), till it comes out on other end.

5. Now you can untwist the end which has come out from other end and spread it a little bit.

6. Take the remaining piece of babana (almost the while piece) and screw in while pushing the wire forward from behind to ensure the wire does not come ot from behind while you twist).

7. Make it as tight as possible. The strnads which wre out are now jammed agains the twisted whole piece.

8. Give a little pull (not too hard) to the wire from behind to see that it is sitting and not loose.

9. Repeat the above for the other conductor with another banana on the same wire.