Wiring problems (help!)

Bri

Hi there,

Not sure if this is the right forum to post in but it seems to be close.

I'm confused by the wiring in the back of my 5yr+ old big technics hi-fi. The speakers are seperate and each has four thin wires going into it. In my ignorance I presumed that two were obviously stereo connections and the other two must be something like power etc.

Thing is, when I tried to extend a speaker across my room using generic wiring connected with the original short cables I was amazed to hear half the music come from 2 cables and half from the other 2.
Then all of a sudden the extended speaker stopped working (I was testing it more than paying attention to the robustness of my handy-work so fair enough), but then the untouched other speaker turned off too while the cd kept playing.

Now if anyone could please explain to me exactly what's going on. These connectors arn't 1/4" stereo jacks etc. they're simply a red/black pair of thin wires you lock in the back, and there's a blue/white pair too.

All I wanna do is extend my speaker but why would the other turn off (is it a safety thing?), cos when only one speaker is connected the other works fine.

Can I extend this kind of setup with 2 cheap speaker cables for each speaker?



Thanks in advance.

Bri.

Eoin Madsen

What do you mean by half the music? In what way was the music halved?

I'm not entirely sure what the four wires are for. For a loudspeaker to work it needs two connections: signal and ground/neutral. Left and right is divided at the souce (the HiFi). Left signal goes to one speaker, right to the other. Most speakers contain a crossover which seperates the signal into treble and bass for the two different parts of the speaker (the top tweeter and the bottom mid/bass driver). On occasion the crossover is inside the HiFi unit and there will be four wires - a signal and ground/neutral for each frequency range. This could be the case, though it seems odd.

There are no real safety issues in a HiFi, the voltage to the speakers is quite small, and I've never heard of an in-built safety cut off in a speaker system. There's not a lot you can do to blow the speakers out either, short of introducing an external current into the system.

Basically if either wire in a circuit is disconnected then there is no circuit, and the speaker in question won't work. And if the wires are connected together before they reach the speaker coil then the signal will run to ground and the speaker won't work. It's hard to say why there'd be a relationship between the two speakers working or not working without knowing a bit more about where all the wires are coming from and going to.

feylya

First of all, I'm going to say RTFM.

Then I'm going to say that it sounds like my bedroom hifi. The red and black wires are for the bass frequencies, the blue and white are for the treble frequencies. You need speakers that can take the four of these wires in order to work properly.

This would also be better in this forum.

Bri

Thanks for the help guys.

Eoin: Half meaning that the newly wired speaker is just having half the output - ie it's weaker, which seems to tie in with what you both said about splitting the frequencies. Funnily enough I never knew that!

feylya: True and true.
In my defence I wouldn't have bothered asking online if I had the manual but since it's relatively old there's not a chance I do!
And I somehow missed the home ent. forum. Doh.

Cheers guys - should be fine now.

Bri.