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Just bought a house with speakers installed- PLZ HELP! CHALLENGE!

post #1 of 5
5/21/12 at 4:35am
Thread Starter 
Hi guys, I just bought my first house and it has several in cieling and in wall speakers installed. Here are some basics.

Great room, kitchen, dining room all have two speakers each. Each have an individual volume control...

There are also three sets of speakers outside 2 on deck, 2 at basement walkout, 2 outside of garage also with volume controls...

There is no amp. The speaker wire coming out of the wall is the following:

4 sets of very thick blue wire, each of which has four individually colored wires (white,black,blue,red) inside of it. Then, two of the blue wires are tied together with electrical tape and speaker wire with two areas to attach is coming from it. This is done twice for the four total blue wires.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? One AV company that came by told me that they would just hook up all the wires to a "high current" reciever and just turn down the stuff that doesn't work...

Lastly, let's say I just buy a reciever myself... Where would I hook up the speaker wire to? I have four total wires to hook up but where would they go? They obviously don't correspond to a surround setup...

Any ideas? I am a relative newbie at Audio equipment so plz be gentle!
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post #2 of 5
5/21/12 at 5:56am
I inherited pretty much the same situation several years ago. I guess the previous owner was very clever and had a heck of a video and audio system in the house but he labeled absolutely nothing. He was an electrical engineer and a senior telecommunication manager so it was particularly frustrating he left no diagram, no labels, no nothing. By trial and error I initially worked through the basics (i.e., getting the sat signal mapped to each room, built in surround sound speakers working) but it was time consuming and frustrating. To this day there is some of the wiring I've never figured out but things are working so I stopped worrying about it. I did have a guy come in a couple of weeks ago to help me rerun some of my coax and it turned out he specializes in all sorts of cabling from phone to computer to coax and told me he often gets jobs helping trace lines and figure out complex wiring. Maybe you can find somebody like him.
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post #3 of 5
5/21/12 at 7:35am
Quote:
Originally Posted by asud View Post

Hi guys, I just bought my first house and it has several in cieling and in wall speakers installed. Here are some basics.

Great room, kitchen, dining room all have two speakers each. Each have an individual volume control...

There are also three sets of speakers outside 2 on deck, 2 at basement walkout, 2 outside of garage also with volume controls...

There is no amp. The speaker wire coming out of the wall is the following:

4 sets of very thick blue wire, each of which has four individually colored wires (white,black,blue,red) inside of it. Then, two of the blue wires are tied together with electrical tape and speaker wire with two areas to attach is coming from it. This is done twice for the four total blue wires.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? One AV company that came by told me that they would just hook up all the wires to a "high current" reciever and just turn down the stuff that doesn't work...

Lastly, let's say I just buy a reciever myself... Where would I hook up the speaker wire to? I have four total wires to hook up but where would they go? They obviously don't correspond to a surround setup...

Any ideas? I am a relative newbie at Audio equipment so plz be gentle!

Sounds like you will either need a good 4 - 8 speaker switch (impedance matching) attached to a receiver or one of those multi-channel house distribution amplifiers. To trace the speakers wires, I would first pull out two of the speakers in one of the rooms to see which wires are being connected to + and - on each speaker. I'd then use an old boom box that has speaker wire terminals in the back to connect to one set of wires at a time to see which speaker produces sound. From there you can figure out and label the wires. It's a little time consuming, but effective.
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post #4 of 5
5/21/12 at 7:48am
Yep, that's pretty much how I did the audio. Might or should add that I used a meter to check if there was any voltage as I had no idea what the guy had done or what it was hooked too. The wiring was not obviously speaker wire, at least none that I'd used or seen before, and I'd already found out he'd done some less than expected workarounds. Video I did with an old VHS and a small monitor. Since some of the coax ran to and from an attic space my wife and I did the "can you see/hear me now" routine.
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post #5 of 5
5/21/12 at 8:16am
Quote:
Originally Posted by asud View Post

4 sets of very thick blue wire, each of which has four individually colored wires (white,black,blue,red) inside of it. Then, two of the blue wires are tied together with electrical tape and speaker wire with two areas to attach is coming from it. This is done twice for the four total blue wires.

You'll probably get more info if you post this in the "Home A/V Distribution" forum below, where the subject of "whole house audio" is discussed daily...

Quote:


Has anyone seen anything like this before? One AV company that came by told me that they would just hook up all the wires to a "high current" reciever and just turn down the stuff that doesn't work...

Yeah, that would be a bad AV company, then. Tying two sets together (as they've done) is probably ok, but more than that will be an issue unless there's impedance matching somewhere in the chain. The volume controls may be doing this, but you need to check this at least with an ohmmeter or by pulling a volume control and identifying the make/model.

Quote:


Lastly, let's say I just buy a reciever myself... Where would I hook up the speaker wire to? I have four total wires to hook up but where would they go? They obviously don't correspond to a surround setup...

The four wires from each zone are 2 (+/-) from each speaker. Whole house audio systems are very typically wired with a 4-conductor cable from the central point (where the equipment goes) to a volume control location in a zone, and from there two speaker wires go to the speakers for that zone. Just easier/cleaner to pull one wire across the house instead of two...

If the volume controls have impedance-matching, then yes, you can hook them up to a receiver. Just note that you'll have two volume controls (the receiver plus the one in each room), so set the receiver volume fairly high and use the in-room controls to come down from that.

Jeff
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