Subwoofer Prewire Question

[johndoe74]

I have two 4-conductor speaker wires prewired to my subwoofer location. My receiver has a Sub-Out and therefore I need RCA connectors between them. I couldn't find any RCA jacks out there that can take a 4-conductor speaker wire, most of them terminates with RG59 or RG6.

What tool or parts would I need to terminate 4-conductor speaker wire into an RCA jack? Thanks.

 

[Mike]

I've seen sub-woofer installs using coax (and an F to RCA adapter or just a compression RCA connector). That does not seem to help you out though.

 

[dublin00]

I have two 4-conductor speaker wires prewired to my subwoofer location. My receiver has a Sub-Out and therefore I need RCA connectors between them. I couldn't find any RCA jacks out there that can take a 4-conductor speaker wire, most of them terminates with RG59 or RG6.

What tool or parts would I need to terminate 4-conductor speaker wire into an RCA jack? Thanks.

It sounds like your pre-wired for what they call a passive sub where you send the front left and right speaker channels to the sub first. It strips off the low frequency with a low pass filter and loops the signal back to your front left and right speakers on the second set of 4-conductor cable. This is usually done for an in-wall type sub-woofer.

Your pretty much out of luck for a powered sub. To do that you need either RG-59 or RG-6 with a solid copper core conductor that can be terminated with RCA jacks.

Do both sets of 4-conductor speaker cable go to your receiver location?

 

[bfisher]

Also, many powered subs will support "Speaker Level" inputs. If you find a sub that does - then you can use the 4 wire from the amp. Check the documentation with the sub - but most will pass through the speaker level - so you wire amp to sub to speakers (which is probably how they wired your house - it's the normal methodology for connecting a sub to satellite speakers).

If you need to stay with a line level sub, you can try using something like this: Line Level Adapter but I do not know if it will work with speaker wire (I've used them, but with never with speaker wire). May want to call HomeTech and ask them... they might know.

 

[DavidL]

From your receiver RCA out, run short RCA jacks to a biampable or mono amplifier and then connect the amp output to the existing sub speaker wire and run a passive subwoofer.

Most setups only need one subwoofer so you will only be using the one pair of speaker wire.
I run a RCA out from the processor (Lexicon) to a Y adapter to a stereo amp (Carver) out to my two subwoofers (15 inch VMMPS).

 

[johndoe74]

I did more research and found out that 4-conductor speaker wire are basically not recommended as a subwoofer cable, due to RFI and could cause hum. Therefore my only option now is what DavidL and bfisher mentioned.

My subwoofer accepts both line-level RCA input and speaker-level inputs. I will try to hook up the subwoofer's speaker-level inputs directly to the Front R/L speakers output of my receiver. I might get an amp specifically for the sub, if this doesn't sound good.

Any recommendations for a decent amplifier that does not cost more than $150, and output about 200watt (My sub is 15" 200watt).