ok well i decided i would make the wife happy and run our surround sound wires through the attic as opposed to along the wall. After 3 nights of crawling around getting covered in fiberglass, losing one cheap flashing in my attic, and an impaling of my knee on a roofing nail, I finally got all the speakers wired and mounted.
my setup basically consists of wire from receiver to post in wall, then a separate wire thru the wall and attic terminating in the wall mounted post where the speaker would be hung. there is then a short piece of wire from the outside of these posts that goes to the speaker itself. All told there are 3 separate sections of wire per speaker going from receiver to main post to speaker post to speaker.
Now for the depressing results...2 speakers appear to be working perfectly... the 2 other speakers i can hear when using the setup mode that sends signal by channel if i increase the setting to max. I guess my main question are all the different things that could be causing me problems. I also noticed when testing that if i turned the volume up at all it would overload the receiver which would then auto shut down. I have definitely played things much louder than what I was before so I am not sure what this means.
Obviously double checking all of the connections is the first step. I am wondering if there is any sort of voltage type meter thing that I can use to see if the wire is getting a signal and at which point it stops getting that signal. Any ideas for a broken DIYer

Do you have a multimeter? You need one to measure resistance (ohms). They also measure voltage, current.

Leaving the speaker connected, disconnect the speaker wire from the back of the receiver on the speakers that are not working.

Set the multimeter to measure resistance.

Hold one lead on the negative terminal and hold the other lead on the positive terminal. Doesn't matter if you mix up the leads.

The reading should be about 20% under the nominal impedance of your speaker. So if it's an 8 ohm speaker it should read between 6 and 7 ohms. If it's a 4 ohm speaker it should read between 3 and 4 ohms.

If it reads 0, that means you have a short in your speaker wire between the receiver and speaker.

I'm guessing you have some wire touching between the binding posts somewhere in your chain.

thank you very much i will get on this im better i got speaker wire touching as well I didn't realize this would cause them to not work...im a noob

"Bare Wire" strands should not be touching. Insulated wire still in its sheath is fine.

Did you use banana plugs at both ends or at least on the receiver end? If not at least on the receiver end I would use plugs (Don't buy the cheapo crimp ones they will give you a headache).

I am using the barewire all the way through it but after going back and having a look i was able to reconnect the wires so they were not touching and now I have fully functional, non-overloading, 5.1 magic...

now if only i could find that coax cable i ran down my wall to move my sub...and that flashlight i dropped in my attic...oh well.

I am using the barewire all the way through it but after going back and having a look i was able to reconnect the wires so they were not touching and now I have fully functional, non-overloading, 5.1 magic...

now if only i could find that coax cable i ran down my wall to move my sub...and that flashlight i dropped in my attic...oh well.

Glad you got it working!

Funny about the flashlight. We ran speaker wires and HDMI through our wall/ceiling. It was quite an adventure.