I have an older Bose system that I recently set up in the bedroom. The speaker wire to the cube speakers has a male RCA end that obviously connects to the female on the speaker.

I would like to experiment with some other speakers using the same speaker wires that came with the Bose system. The reason being that the wires have been ran through the floor at one end of the room, and back through at the other end.

Bottom line...is there an adapter that would have at one end a female RCA end and at the other would have a positive and negative wire?

Thanks

There is probably not any such adapter, since Bose uses proprietary cabling for that stuff. You could just decapitate the cable's RCA plug and get to the two wires that way. Another option would be to use the Bose wire as a pull string for a real speaker cable. Both approaches assume that the Bose speakers are permanently evicted. Thinking back on my old Acoustimass cubes, I would say the likelihood of that is high once you start experimenting with other speakers, but I don't know if you're quite that committed to that.

I guess a third option would be to get a female-to-female RCA adapter (I think I've found some at both MonoPrice and Radio Shack before) and a cheap RCA patch cord (you probably have some left over from an old VCR or DVD player) that you could snip one end off of. You'll have to use trial and error to figure out the positive and negative conductors no matter what you do (unless you use the existing cable as a pull string, that is) and the wire gauge is probably a bit on the puny side, but it would be a non-permanent modification...

Wow - so Bose uses RCA tips for their speakers, or is that from days long gone? My only practical experience with them was the Bose system in one of my cars, which was not upgrade-friendly thanks to their goofy setup.

BOSE!!!!!!! I know...I know.....But it's better than nothing.

Thanks Gonk!

They've been doing that for quite a few years now on their speaker "systems" - my Acoustimass from 1997 used bare wires and spring clips, but starting probably a few years later they moved to this approach. It simplifies setup, but it means you are locked into the length of wire they give you and makes it impossible to re-use the wire for other speakers.
I think you've created the perfect slogan for them!

A little pricey but this might work:

http://www.mitcables.com/?option=com_vir...9&product_id=15

You'd also need F/RCA adapters which you can get at RadioShack.

Regarding positive and negative, the standard for RCA (unbalanced) cables/jacks/plugs is that the positive is the center pin and the negative is the outer ground sleeve. Radio Shack sells speaker cable with RCA plugs on both ends. Many years ago, they sold a cable with RCA plug on one end and alligator clips on the other. So, I took a look at the RS web site today, and they have a cable with male RCA plug on one end and spade lugs on the other. Unfortunately, it's 12 feet of cable, not an adapter thing. I did notice that on the RS cables at least, the wire used with the RCA plugs is still a standard two-conductor zip cord, not interconnect-type coax. If the Bose cables are similar wire and the Bose speakers with RCA jacks are no longer going to be used, another option is to simply cut off the RCA plug on the speaker end and strip the wires to use with the new speakers. Of course, now we don't know which wire is positive and which one's negative unless Bose was good enough to mark the wire. Being an electronic techie type, I have a DVM, so my method in a case where I need to determine wire polarity on a long, unmarked wire run is to connect a battery to one end and read the DC voltage at the other paying attention to the polarity of the voltage on the DVM. Works every time.