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

Y splitters hook 2 sets of drivers in parallel, which halves the inductance. So the amp current doubles going into the low impedene load and it trips. You are lucky your amp has a breaker and does’t just fail from the high current.

Never hook 2 loads up in parallel to one set of speaker outputs.

But the ’Y’ splitters are not going to be connected to the amp, they are going to be used in the RCA outs of the preamp in order to send a full frequency signal to the subs and then also the RCA ins of the amp?

previous Y connector discussion

Klipsch forum discussion of Y connectors from preamp

AVS Y splitter from preamp discussion

AV forums discussion on Y splitters from preamp

I feel like a kid with a new toy with this url thing that @Dill showed me how to use!

Anyway, @griz, I don't know enough about this stuff to say you can or cannot safely do this, but I do know that back in my days of HT I called Cary Audio and asked the tech guy whether it would be okay to split the signal from pre with a 'Y' splitter, and the tech guy was okay with it.  What I was doing is not the same as what you are doing, however, I wanted to try (and did  actually do this for a while) splitting the center channel signal from my HT preamp and sending 1/2 to one side of my Cary tube amp, and then sending the other half to the other side of that same Cary amp, and then basically using that to biamp (so to speak) my center speaker.

Which is not what you are doing, as you are wanting to send one signal to two different amps, and do that two times (signal split to main amp L RCA in and also to L sub RCA in and then the same for the R side).

Maybe post that question on amps and preamps forum and maybe @atmasphere may see it and provide an answer.

@immatthewj

Your Klipsch link is the most applicable to what the OP is doing. The person on that link who suggested running the line level connectors to the subs first and then a second line level connection from the subs to the amps, was using the sub’s crossover as a high-pass filter. That does have its benefits but the trade-off is essentially adding additional crossover parts in the signal path. I have a fairly high-end, balanced Marchand passive high-pass filter here and, with my speakers, I like running them without the filter better than with it, so it sits in a box. The level of benefit from using a high-pass filter will depend on the bass capabilities and roll-off characteristics of the specific main speakers being used as well as the behavior of the amplifier powering the main speakers. However, since the main speakers are intended to be run full out normally, the benefits of a high-pass filter can be subtle or perhaps not audible or, in some cases, may even make things sound worse.

Sorry I didn't follow everything going on here.  Y splitters on the RCA low level signal are ok.