My brother is setting up a HT using thick stranded 12ga wire, not your normal speaker type of fine strand...sounds fine except he gets no signal to the sub woofer. He soldered the ends with rca jacks....could this type of wire prevent a signal from the receiver on the SW output? when hooking it up straight to the receiver with a coax it works fine.

thanks for the help.
Brett

He put RCA's on the wire himself? He needs to make sure that he properly terminated the cables. There are some excellent instructions for this, which I'm trying to find. Someone else (such as Altec, who wrote the instructions I'm thinking of) may get back here with a link before I do...

A minute or so with the cable and a multimeter will tell you if:
1. The center terminals at the two ends are connected.
2. The outer terminals at the two ends are connected.
3. The center and outer terminals are *not* connected.

If these conditions don't hold, it's the cable.

The type of wire and the impedance are not particularly important in this application except that he may pick up hum from any power cords or transformers nearby. The wavelength is far too long at the frequencies of interest for impedance matching to be important.

Twisting the wire will help reduce pickup of unwanted signals. One turn per foot should suffice.

Here is what I was looking for . The tests that mahansm suggests are good ones, but it's possible that a quick review of the instructions at that link will identify if there was a more fundamental error made in cable termination.

thanks, guys....must be his termination at the rca plugs then.
thank for the help!
I'll have hime review the instructions Gonk.....