speakers and cables


this is about me being a loser and problem creator.

I finally got a 2nd subwoofer and I was excited to hook it up. Well, not too excited. I knew it would be a pain to hook it up. I was excited to hear it. I spent over 90 minutes connecting the speaker wires to my power amp. When I turned it on, the left channel was gone. It blew the fuse. I disconnected everything, replaced the fuse, hooked it up again. It worked for 10 seconds, blew the fuse again.

The way I hooked them up was I went from the sub speaker out from both subwoofers, rolled the left and right side wires together so I had 4 wires that I connected to the left and right plus and minus channels - speaker binders on the power amp. What are my options? My preamp has no sub out. Nor my amp.

Stupid question: should I just go from left to left on one sub and right to right on the other sub?

grislybutter

@grislybutter,

There's only filters on your subs, not active. I guess you can call them really simple crossovers. They work whether the subs amp is on or off. I believe what @deep_333 is saying is; in a higher end system, unless your gear has a 'sub out' to go directly to your sub so your amp speaker outs can go directly to your speakers so you can bypass the subs sound degrading outs, it's always the way to go since your speakers will receive a much 'cleaner' signal than if also run through the sub.

Might not be the smartest guy in the room, I don't understand why this is so difficult. 

You have 1 amp, 2 subs and 2 speakers. 

You are going to be using line level inputs on the subs. You have L/R subs

Amp has L/R outputs

There are L/R speakers. 

Easy way is to go....

amp-LSub-Lspeaker 

Amp-Rsub-Rspeaker

You can do that a few ways run speaker wire to the sub, speaker wire from sub to speaker. Or you can bi-wire sub/speaker

The other way if you want speaker fist to not degrade the signal is...

amp-Lspaker-Lsub

You can us a spade from the speaker to the sub.

Keep it simple, don't overthink it, don't think you need to buy a bunch of things and have a tangled mess to hook up. Also use the crossovers and filters on the subs. I don't have subs on the 2ch stop, but have 2 big subs on my HT setup. Hooking them up was easy, getting the XO point, location and level set was the most difficult. Also when done, make sure the subs are in phase. That will kill this entire process. 

@immathewj @mswale @thecarpathian

I apologize if I confused or frustrated anyone. I know it's a simple issue for people who know what they are doing. I clearly don't.

In the process, I learned a few things though. The silver lining is that if I had a sub out or pre out on my component, I wouldn't have gone down in these rabbit holes and would not have learned anything. 

I also learned many ways to degrade a signal devil 

I think for the most part we're all guilty of making this sound way more difficult than it is.

The only way my way will work is if the output on sub1 sends the full signal to sub2, which it won’t. It’s low pass filter at the input I believe will stop the lows there and only pass on the higher signal through the high pass filter on its output to sub2 negating what having a second sub in the mix is for in the first place since no low Hz signal will be going to it.

Now you’ve got me going for my own supply of baby aspirin, @thecarpathian.

There’s only filters on your subs, not active.

Also use the crossovers and filters on the subs.

I apologize if I confused or frustrated anyone.

I am not at all frustrated, but I can understand how anyone could be confused after reading through all of this.

On edit:  but be sure to let us know how you feel about the sound when you put the 'Y' splitters in.