Powered Speaker Via Aux Question?

[JohnJohn]

Hi- I am needing to rig a powered speaker via an Aux on the Desk in my church, the only problem is that the speaker needs about 60m of cable. I/ we have little or no budget and was wondering what is the most cost effective way of doing this, I've herd that you can use mains cable as speaker cable in some cases but i'm sure this would not work as its a line signal, kind of like a guitar lead??? which is very expensive

My questions are

1. what would be the best cable to use?
2. will I have a loss in quality at this cable length?

Any help is so much appreciated

Thank you for taking the time to read this

[bpalermini]

Standard mic cable (or a few of them strung together) will work just fine.

[boltd]

Let me ask a clarifying question.

Is your mixer a powered mixer or is the speaker a powered speaker.

If the speaker is a powered speaker (has an internal amplifier) then it should have an XLR jack on it. If that is the case then bpalermini's suggestion will work.

If the mixer has it's own internal amplifier and you are using a powered aux output on the mixer to drive a regular unpowered speaker then you are going to have to run a proper speaker cable to it.

[Brad Weber]

Originally Posted by bpalermini

Standard mic cable (or a few of them strung together) will work just fine.

A pet peeve of mind but I've seen the terminology "mic cable" cause confusion when line level audio is involved, as it apparently is here. The reality is that it is quite common to use the same cable for both microphone and line level audio.

I've also found it quite common for three actually independent factors of the signal (balanced/unbalanced, mic/line/speaker level, etc.), the cable (shielded twisted pair/unshielded twisted pair/coax/etc.) and the connectors (XLR/0.25" TRS/0.25" TS/RCA/etc.) to get often be used improperly. The main issue here is that while there are some inherent pairings, there are often assumed correlations that do not really exist. For example, an RCA connector is inherently unbalanced and rarely used for anything other than line level audio. In comparison, a XLR connector is simply a connector and although commonly used for balanced, microphone signals on shielded, twisted pair cable, it is really just a connector and is not inherently limited to a balanced or unbalanced signal or to mic or line level or to any particular cable type.

[Mustangnaz]

Best bang for the buck I've found on cables is monoprice. A couple hundred footers should do the trick: http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2

[Brad Weber]

Originally Posted by Mustangnaz

Best bang for the buck I've found on cables is monoprice. A couple hundred footers should do the trick: http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2

Just the usual warning that if this is an install application rather than portable/temporary use then be aware of how and where the cable is running and verify that you don't need any riser or plenum rated cable, are compromising fire rated partitions or anything like that.