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: I won’t try to speak for @mswale, but a HIGH PASS filter is what I thought he meant, and I certainly screwed up (OOPS!) when I posted above by referring to a HP filter a a LP filter. I edited my post.

You already have an adjustable low pass filter on your subwoofer. The high pass filter is what would edit the frequency of the signal going to your mains.

(So if the high pass filter was set at 80hZ your mains would then only theoretically only try to go down to 80, and then you could start playing with the low pass on your subs from 80 on up, and trying to match the subs with the mains.)

@immathewj

almost there. Very dumb question (you are used it to by now) does the high pass filter go between amp and main speakers? Or between preamp and amp?

(and I know sub HAS a low pass filter so I just have to connect it to the signal BEFORE low pass filter.)

OOPS again! I think maybe @mswale was talking about replacing the existing low pass filter that is already in your sub? To one that can be adjusted lower than 80 hZ to better match up with the low frequencies of your mains ? (I’ll stay out of it now.)

almost there. Very dumb question (you are used it to by now) does the high pass filter go between amp and main speakers? Or between preamp and amp?

OOPS for the 3rd time. I didn’t see this. Not a dumb question.

The high pass filter goes in between the preamp and the amp, the connections would be RCA cables. The high pass filter would have RCA outs to go to the subs.

What the highpass filter would do is only allow 80 hZ and up (if that was what it was set at) to go out to your amp. Therefore your mains would only see 80 hZ and up. However, the high pass filter would be sending the full frequency signal to your sub, where your existing low pass filter (which seems only adjustable down to 80 hZ) would regulate where the sub is supposed to start making bass.

However, I have been told, that even with these filters in place, the frequency cross over point is not usually a clean chop off, hence you might still need to play around with the low pass on the subs (from 80 on up).