Speaker Hook-Up

Speaker wire, fancy or expensive read this sheet before hooking up your amp. Some cases thick, high-end wire can cause MORE of a problem than the conventional skinnier stuff.

The term "amp" (short for amplifier) will be used to refer to any receiver, integrated amp or power amp.

Use extra care in hooking up any solid state (transistorized) amp. Make sure the amp is turned off before connecting the speakers. Next make sure your wires are long enough to reach the speakers in one piece - rather than splicing numerous pieces together. When connecting the wire to the amp and speaker, make sure you have the proper "connectors" on the wire to mate with their respective terminals. There are many types of plugs, jacks etc., used for this application. We can either supply you with these connectors or send you to a place that has them. Often connector plugs are not needed and simply "tinning" the stranded wire with solder is adequate. In general loose strands of wire are NOT good either at the speaker or amp!

What About Thick, High End Wire?

Does this type of wire make any difference? If the length of wire is more than 50 feet, the light duty stuff that we give away with a purchase (18 gauge), may have some signal loss. Thick wire can present problems of its own.The main problem is that it is frequently too thick to cleanly attach to the amp or speakers. You MUST do whatever is needed to make the wire small enough at the end to make a clean connection. This can be done either with special connectors OR thinning down the number of conductors and tinning them.

Check the "phasing" of your speakers. In simple terms it means making sure the positive side of the amp goes to the positive side of the speaker and negative to negative as well. Positive and negative are marked in many different ways. Red screws, a plus sign (+), "8," etc., indicate positive; black screws, "0," a minus sign (-), "G," etc., indicate negative. Tie a knot in the negative side of the wire to make it easy to identify later. Transparent insulation showing different colored (usually silver and copper) wires make it easy to distinguish negative from positive, but all twin lead wire has some code, such as a ridge or a colored stripe to distinguish it from the other.

One final thing: If your speakers are less than 8 ohms ask us before you hook up another set of speakers to the same amp!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

How Speakers Work

In any sound system, ultimate quality depends on the speakers. The best recording, encoded on the most advanced storage device and played by a top-of-the-line deck and amplifier, will sound awful if the system is hooked up to poor speakers.

A system's speaker is the component that takes the electronic signal stored on things like CDs, tapes and DVDs and turns it back into actual sound that we can hear.

­In this article, we'll find out exactly how speakers do this. We'll also look at how speaker designs differ, and see how these differences affect sound quality. Speakers are amazing pieces of technology that have had a profound impact on our culture. But at their heart, they are remarkably simple devices.

So choose the speakers according to your needs.

source: electronics.howstuffworks.com

loudspeaker

Loudspeaker or speaker, device used to convert electrical energy into sound. It consists essentially of a thin flexible sheet called a diaphragm that is made to vibrate by an electric signal from an amplifier. The vibrations create sound waves in the air around the speaker. In a dynamic speaker, the most common kind, the diaphragm is cone-shaped and is attached to a coil of wire suspended in a magnetic field produced by a permanent magnet. A signal current in the suspended coil, called a voice coil, creates a magnetic field that interacts with the already-existing field, causing the coil and the diaphragm attached to it to vibrate. To provide a faithful reproduction of music or speech, a loudspeaker must be able to reproduce a wide range of audio frequencies (i.e., 20 Hz to 20 kHz). Since it is difficult for a single speaker to do that adequately, many quality sound systems employ speakers of three different sizes. The largest ones, or woofers, reproduce low frequencies; the medium-sized ones, or midrange speakers, reproduce middle frequencies; the smallest ones, or tweeters, reproduce high frequencies. The three sizes were traditionally contained in the same cabinet, with a pair of such speakers used for stereophonic sound, but increasingly in the late 1980s and early 1990s home sound systems used smaller pairs of speakers enclosures containing only the midrange speakers and tweeters and a single woofer cabinet designed to be placed in an out-of-the-way location. This design takes avantage of the fact that the human ear is not good at determining the direction of low-frequency sound, and thus stereo perception is not adversely affected by the location of the woofer. A crossover network is a filter in a speaker system that ensures that each speaker receives only signals in the frequency range it is designed to reproduce. A properly designed enclosure can reduce unwanted resonances and extend the frequency range of a speaker system. Along with dynamic speakers, other speaker types include electrostatic and piezoelectric.

Source: encyclopedia2.tfd.com