speakers crackling after running new wire?

[bevo]

My speakers are now crackling after switching to 14 gauge wire. I was using the wire that came in my old sony all in one. I actually never had any problems at all with it. I bought some 14g phillips wire from walmart, and now my speakers are acting kind of weird.

I know that walmart is probably not the best place to buy anything for a home theater, but speaker wire should work no matter where you get it.

What could I have done to make my speakers crackle like they are? It sounds like a short somewhere, but I can't find one.

If one of the wires have a bad connection, would it make all of the speakers make this noise, or would it just be the one speaker with the bad wire?

Here's another question while I'm thinking of it.
I have a dennon 1909, and have been noticing that my cable every so often goes out for 2 or 3 seconds. Sometimes it's just sound, others it's video, sometimes it's both. I have my cable box hooked up hdmi. It doesn't seem to do it with the ps3, and has only done it once with the 360.

Is this something that happens occasionally, when running everything through a receiver? Or should I take the receiver in for service?

[TNRabbit]

Have you physically handled all the cable from end to end to listen for the crackling? Or tried (carefully) moving the receiver to see if that causes the crackling?

[jeeper_nick]

Don't take offense, but are you sure you got the polarity right from the AVR to the speakers? Positive to positive and negative to negative?

[dborzz]

If your picture and sound is going out on it's own you may have a bum hdmi cable, however if it's just going out for a few seconds when switching channels or formats, then that's fine because hdmi is a complicated signal that sometimes takes your receiver a second to process.