I recently was at a customers house who had 4 pairs of speakers, 8 total, throughout his house, and all of the speakers were wired to one Jack of with a red and black, left and right connector. ALL of the speakers went to this one jack, and i would ASSUME that this is incorrect?

Question is, what is the proper way to hook up the speakers to the sound source?

Do you have all speakers going to one jack, and power it with a high watt amp?

Do you have every speaker seperatley wired into a speaker selector box?

??

You usually will run each individual speaker back to the main location (Sometimes called a home run). From there they can go into a speaker selector and then the amp/receiver, or they can go into an impedance matched transformer then the amp/receiver. Also you could run 2 speakers that are in a room and run them into a volume control and then back to the receiver/speaker selector/transformer. You could also wire the speaker parellel with each other using impedance matched volume control. Having only one red and one black is not the right way. You will only receive mono throughout the house. I have seen electricians wire it this way and then we were contracted to put in all of the equipment. Fun stuff.

Mike

I wouldn't say that there is one corret way to do this. You can do it the way that it was run if you have impedance matching volume controls at each location. Another way is to run all the speakers through a speaker selector, which you mentioned). The preferrable way is to have a multi-zone amp powering each speaker separately.

CJ

Also possible it is a 70 volt line system.

Well Discomike - welcome to the custom world. You can't assume anything. You'll have to do a little research. Pull out the volume controls. Do they have (2) 4 conductor wires connected on the VC? (parallel) Pull out the wall plate. Are there (4) wires there? You won't know until you look.

The poster didn't mention volume controls, although it would be hard to imagin that they aren't present. These could be pwer match volume controls in which case this simple configuration would be fine.

Not with only two speaker terminals (1 red and 1 black). THis would be correct with 2 red and 2 black. With the way it is wired the only thing you could do short of rewiring is to select the mono soundfield on the receiver/processor.

Mike

i think he meant one red and black for left and a second black and red for right. there will be more info needed to diagnose. the VC's if present may be looped. if not then ??? we will however need more insight from Disco Mike

Actually, the poster indicated that there was a left and a right (red / black) binding post