When making the final connections between a pair of speaker and a stereo amp, is it important to get the right and left speaker correctly inputted to the right and left channel on the amp ?

After thinking over this question for myself, at first i thought yes, but after some further thought, ive got a bit confused, because if you have ceiling speakers in the centre of a room, you could walk to either side of the ceiling speakers thus switching the left and right

Depending on the situation.

Floorstanding, theater, etc speakers need to be correctly connected.

Ceiling speakers, less so unless you have 4 or more speakers in a zone and you don't have the ability to do mono in said zone.

Which side of the orchestra do you want the violins on?

Rob,
As to violins on left or right, when you're in the audience the violins are on the left. Your wiring and speaker location should be such that the violins are on the left.

Unless you're a bass player in the orchestra, in which case almost the entire orchestra is far on the right side. Et cetera.

Zeroing in on exactly what you asked, which is about connections:


First, I find it helpful, especially in troubleshooting situations, to describe things in terms of the direction of signal flow. When things go wrong, that approach helps you see sensible things.

So the right and left speaker are never inputted to the right and left channels of the amp. The left and right channels of the amp are outputted to the left and right speakers.

The two amplifer sections of a stereo amp should perform identically. The left and right speakers should perform identically. Therefore either speaker could be connected to either amp output and there would be no difference in performance. Obviously if the signal is stereo, the two channels will not have the same audio information.

There's one kind of case where you should pay attention to which side the speaker is on, and that's where the speaker parts are not in the lateral center of the speaker.

Some speaker designs have a left and right speaker that are symmetrical to one another but asymmetrical themselves. That is, say, the midrange and tweeter on the left speaker is toward the right side of the front panel, and the mid and tweeter of the right speaker is toward the left side of the front panel. Those will sound different if not placed on the intended side. Those should be placed correctly.

Showing my age, thought everyone new the violin joke, (clearly the violins belong on the left) of course I suppose today it’s less relevant as music is rarely recorded live, or with any true soundstage.

Live music that most folks experience today is over amped to cover the artists inability to perform outside a heavily filtered recording studio. Clients have no point of reference to what it’s suppose to sound like in their home.

One reason to maintain L/R coherence would be that the action of the stereo balance control would be correct. Otherwise there could be user complaints of "incorrect operation". Of course, if the speakers are part of a surround setup, correct L/R is important.

Since room center ceiling speaker locations give little sense of concert hall imaging, if the L/R location of the violins is important to the customer, include a 4PDT switch to flip L/R, depending on the current location of the listener.

What is 'over amped'? Do you mean they use big amplifiers or the PA is really loud?

How is it supposed to sound in homes? Recording engineers and producers don't give a rat's butt about that- they care about how it sounds in the control room when they record the basic tracks and when they master it. People think they want it to sound exactly the same as it did in the studio, but I doubt many would, if they could hear it in a studio- most home audio systems are more 'polite-sounding' than monitors that are there to show flaws in the sound, such as Yamaha NS-10 (in any version).

Agree -- I don't enjoy the control room sound outside of the control room.

Id say it only matters that left and right are important in a two channel set up if there is video involved. Other than that, I doubt anyone would ever know they might be backwards.

Aside from special effect sounds being on the wrong side and moving in the wrong direction....

I do think that speakers which are more 'accurate' in the way they reproduce sound are cool to listen to, although speakers that are accurate in the "instruments sound just the same as they did in the studio" sense can be very fatiguing when the music has a lot of upper midrange. As much as I like my main guitar amp, it can really be painful if the level is too high, especially with a Telecaster or some Strat pickups.

One of 40,000, 60 year old customers may notice that Paul and Ringo are in the wrong speaker.

Peter and Paul had their own speaker, while Mary was smack dab in the middle.

In a video zone it matters for obvious reasons.

In a non video zone... ceiling with 4 speakers you want to make it so that its left right left right so that wherever you stand its stereo.

In a ceiling with 2 speakers it doesn't matter but i try to logically choose. So in a bedroom (with no tv) i choose left and right based on laying in bed. In a kitchen i might base it on facing the cabinets or kitchen island. A porch i base it on sitting down facing away from the house.

Ideally you want to keep the stereo image as intended. Once you start changing that theme you lose all reference points all the way down the chain when troubleshooting and that probably is the biggest drawback. Now going back to old songs the you know, would also bother you while listening knowing what side of the track things should be on!

As far as L-R, Every mix is different as far as instrument placement and that's clearly up to the producer or mix engineer. When I recorded and mixed records for a over a decade it was all about how we set up the musicians in the live room or how I decided I wanted to place things in the stereo space to get the best possible clarity and "space" in the mix. I would say wiring things out of phase would have a more dramatic and negative impact then L-R balance...as far as sonics go(although we often had certain channels in the mix out of phase to create space as well).