I am moving to a new flat. For domestic peace, it would be great if I can run naca5 at 12 meters in an in-wall duct.
It would require bending the cable as it first goes 6 meters on the long-wall, and then takes a soft corner and goes 5 meters on the short wall to the opposite corner of the room vs the hifi system.
4 questions that I would much appreciate your advice/thoughts on
long run of 12 meters - I have read on the forum that naca5 is optimal at 10-20 meters so all good on the length right?
duct - is it ok to put the naca5 into a duct inside the wall (not glued to the outside).
One or Two ducts - Can I run the 2 naca5 cables in the same duct or should I have dedicated ducts so the cables dont touch?
any learnings from doing something similar/ how to best install eg hairdryer to bend the cable etc
Hope this can work, it woukd mean a lot to me. If this works, I can keep my full amp system rather than going from 552/300 to sn3.
It will be fine. Just bend it round the corner using your hairdryer, hair straighteners, eyebrow blowtorch or whatever. One conduit, stuff it in, sit back and enjoy.
You will need quite large diameter ducting to take two cables, and you may have difficulty pulling them around a sharp bend, so a more gentle curve would be better. This may or may not be easy depending on the construction of the wall.
If you’re not confident to do this yourself, ask an electrician. They are used to pulling stiff electrical cables theough walls so this should be easy for them.
Are you still building the house? If so, have you thought about ducting through the concrete (?) floor? This could allow avoiding bends, and possibly changing the cable if you fancy a new flavour…
Good question! Its a building from 1904 so that part is already done. Also there oak wodden floors and its not an option to run the cable there. But agree could have been an approach. Thx Lars
I ran my Naca5 through a 2" pvc piping in the wall. Both lines in one pipe. Pulling it through and around corners was not too challenging. I used electrical wire as a pull cord- no stretch. Just taped it up really well in parallel with the Naca and fished it through.
I have 12 m naca5 runs in my office and no problem running them in parallel. Only thing which improved sound quality was to make sure that no power leads were close to the cables.
I also have linn k20 runs of 10m, and I find these long runs sounding better than my 3.5 and 5m runs which I both have for a5 and k20.
I frequently change positions of the hifi to experience and having various lengths helps for this!
If the bends in the duct are not too sharp I think a single duct would be OK.
Another possible option could be hollow skirting board which is designed to enclose wiring, and may be an easier option than opening up the wall to hide ducting.
I will discuss these options with the electrician. Its an old flat with wooden panels on lower part of the wall, so in-wall likely blends in better. But if not possible, your solution can be an alternative for sure.
I got a small but worthwhile improvement by separating my parallel runs of NACA5 by a couple of inches. So, if I was doing this, I’d definitely go for two ducts if it was feasible.
This would be my (strong) recommendation - subject to asking Naim to check with Steve Sells or Robin. Which I’ve now done.
Running long lengths of cable in close proximity caused problems with a customer’s installation and, as the work had been completed, we were left with trying to mitigate, rather than solve the problem.
You are advised to run the two channels a few inches apart - avoid having them entirely adjacent. So - two conduits or one wide channel with enforced social distancing.
In the case I dealt with the cable may not have been NACA5 and the wiring actually pushed the amplifier into instability.
It’s good to know that this is an official recommendation. In my situation I have 2 × 9m lengths of A5. The part where they run parallel is maybe 4m, with one of the runs doing the back-and-forth looping thing to take up the slack.
i have tried SL and chord sarum etc. Nothing gets close to naca5 IME so happy to commit fully to it.
