Concealing Speaker Wires for Home Theater Speakers

With the advent of HDTV and Dolby Digital 5.1, a good home theater center requires six speakers. This can cause a nightmare when trying to conceal all those speaker wires. There are some solutions and some are simpler than others.

If your room has a carpet, then it's simple enough to run the wires under the carpet. You may want to purchase flat speaker wire for this job, as it will not bulge through the carpet and sits flat on the floor.

If you have a hardwood or tile floor, you can run flat speaker wire along the baseboard molding and then paint the wires to match the color of the molding. If you have to cross a doorway opening, then route the flat speaker wire under the doorway saddle to get to the other side. This can usually been done by prying up the saddle with a hammer and crow bar and feeding the flat cable through. If you remove the doorway saddle completely, be sure to keep the speaker wires clear from the nail holes.

Another solution that requires a lot more work is to purchase in-wall speakers. You may want to use this option if you don't want six big speakers all over your room. Installing in-wall speakers is a lot more work, since it involves cutting holes in the walls for the speakers and snaking speaker cable through your walls. If your room is on the first floor, then you have the option of running the wires under the crawl space or basement of your house. If you decide to do in-wall speaker installations, make sure you purchase speaker cable that is rated for in-wall use.

One other alternative in a home theater system is to purchase a wireless speaker system. This eliminates the need for running any speaker wires at all. This type of speaker system does require that each speaker is plugged into an AC outlet. So, you will need to make sure that you have a AC outlet in the vicinity of each speaker.

Don't have room for six speakers? You can purchase a compact surround sound system. These compact systems only require running speaker wires from one side of the room to the other without having to worry about rear speakers and wires. This is a less expensive alternative for a home theater system and a good way to achieve good surround sound.

With the compact surround sound speaker systems, you can achieve remarkably good theater sound and the small control center gives you the home theater sound.