To show you what I am dealing with, here is my receiver:
And here is one of the speakers I am connecting to: (as you can tell my room is a mess)
You will need a few things for this process (some obvious, some less obvious, some optional)
-The two wires you will be connecting (Make sure you have the correct length to reach from your speaker to your receiver, Measure twice, cut once! And always give yourself some extra wire to work with)
-Make sure that both of your wires are red and black (or whatever color your speaker/receiver have). One set of mine is flat grey and the other is red and black which will make it difficult setting up which side goes to which but I will show you a method that will help a tiny bit
-Electrical tape (Very heavily recommended although not completely required, basically if you don't have it you will most likely get heavy interference)
-Special wire-cutter with different slot for different sizes (Optional but makes the job a heck of a lot easier than using your fingers to pry off the outside of the wire)
-Receiver and Speakers (Pretty obvious, not shown)
(It is pretty obvious that I am writing this while I am in the process of doing it. This is simply because I wanted to listen to music but someone had sucked up my wire and I needed to completely redo it. Instead of getting it done in two seconds, I figured I would make a tutorial.)
Now that you have all of your items together, separate the wire ends and cut the plastic off of the tips of all of your wire. Set up the wire on your cutter as shown in the picture above, clench the handles, and pull. When you remove the outer lining, twist the copper so that all the strands make one strong piece. Your wires should look like those pointed out in the picture.
The three wires shown here are 1) the original wire uncut 2) the wire I cut (greyish) 3) the factory made wire (red and black).
Some points on your wires:
-You can cut off the outer layer twice as much and then fold in half what you have revealed to make a more dense looking wire connection, but this will not do much aside from give you a sense of a secure connection
-Make sure you twist your wire ends, this will provide a more solid connection as the current will run through the whole thing all at once instead of hitting each spliced end
When you get here, wrap the wires around each other (red to red, black to black) of the wires you wish to connect it to. Do this as you would a wire-tire. After you have done so, wrap each one in electrical tape hitting the plastic part first so that the tape stays secure while you wrap the rest otherwise it will slip off the wire end. Here is a picture of both the twisting and wrapping steps. (It is easier to twist with a needlenose plier if you have one of those lying around)
What I noticed during this process was that one of my grey cable wires was silver and the other copper. I used this to my advantage and made the silver connect to black and copper connect to red. This will help me locate which one to use at the speaker end of the cable.
After you have twisted and wrapped each pair of wire, wrap both of them together with some electrical tape, but not too much if you want to remove it later on. Put your wires in correctly on both ends (receiver and speaker) but don't worry if you don't hear sound initially, just mix and match the wires, you most likely put the wrong one in the wrong spot.
As a final note, you are able to piggy back multiple speakers from one output but I would not recommend it on this size gauge wire. Instead, if you want to do this, get a different gauge wire that supports more current and wrap two (or more) around the connection point as you would have done with just one wire. Viola, you now have extended speaker wire.
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