# running electrical



## Guest (Jan 28, 2008)

I Know its a bad idea to run electrical wire near audio wire but i am curious if I run the electrical in pvc and audio in pvc next to each other to you guys thing i will have a problem with bleed over or an audible hum.


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## brucek (Apr 11, 2006)

> audio wire


What are you running exactly? Balanced line level, speaker wire, RCA coax unbalanced?


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## Anthony (Oct 5, 2006)

the electric fields do not care (much) that the PVC is in the way. However, the PVC will force some separation, which is good. Many times when people run these wires together there's only a few mm or inches of seprataion and the wires are parallel for a long run. That's a worst case where a lot of noise i picked up.

Your PVC idea will keep some separation (hopefully more than a few inches -- like 8" to 1' or more). However the signals can still pick up noise if these runs are parallel for too long. A better bet would be to quickly cross the lines at a 90 degree angle and then make sure the runs are well separated.

That all said: if you have speaker wires in the other conduit, the chance of picking up a signal is very low. speaker signals are very high level, as compared with cable, antenna, or audio (RCA). If you are talking about running video that close to power, you may see a visible distortion, ringing, or ghost lines scroll on the screen). Audio would pick up a hum. Of course many types of RG6 are shielded and can reject some of this noise, so if they are only parallel for a short run, you should be fine.

Sorry if I raised more questions for you than answered. The short answer is, keep them as far away as possible.


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