Is this harmfull? (1 Viewer)

[Jon Krangel]

About a month ago, I bought nice new Klipsch speakers for my HT and the rears replaced two cube style cambridge soundworks speakers (actually, they were borrowed form my computer, they are from their soundworks series). I mounted these a bit too far back, and thought that instead of taking them down, they would work great as a surround back L/R channels. The problem is, my Onkyo 797 only has a single amp for a SB channel. Since these speakers are not exactly high powered speakers, (they are 8 ohm speakers that were sold with a 21 watt amp) is it ok to hook both of them up to the SB channel amp on my reciever? The manual says this is not a good thing to do, but I have seen people do stuff like this before without damaging anything.

Thanks

BTW - The reason that I dont move one speaker into the right place is because if I move these, I'll have two nasty holes in the roof, and boy do I hate spackle!

 

[Ned]

If each Cambridge cube is 8 ohms each then it'll be a nominal 4 ohm load on the amp channel. It may dip as low as 2-3 ohms depending on how the cubes are designed. Some receiver amps don't like a low impedance load like that and may overheat. However, the SB channel isn't exactly driven hard most of the time and if you run it small the demands should be pretty light.

Try it and see if your receiver has a noticeable increase in heat. If not it should be ok.

 

[Allan Jayne]

You are safer connecting the two speakers in series. That is, single wires from amplifier plus to speaker 1 plus, speaker 1 minus to speaker 2 plus, speaker 2 minus to amplifier minus.
An amp generally delivers more power to a lower impedance load which is a parallel connection in this case. But as mentioned above, you ahve to be careful about not turning it up too loud.
For series connections you can tie together both the gold and silver conductors of 14 gauge speaker cable at both ends to get 12 gauge performance (both conductors of 16 gauge cable yield about 13 gauge that generally suffices for runs up to 40 feet or for rear speakers where minute degradation isn't as apparent.
Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/video.htm

 

[Brett DiMichele]

To further elaborate on Allan's great advice. When you wire
those 2 cubes in Series you now have a 16 Ohm Load rather
than 8 x 8 ohm or 4 Ohm if wired in paralell. A 16 Ohm load
will not do damage to your amps output stage and everything
should run smooth as silk.
To put Allan's description into something you can visualize
this is how you will be wiring.
+ --------------[AMP]-------------- -
+ Speaker - + Speaker -
Hopefuly that makes some sense.. If you need something more
easy to follow, just let me know and I will draw it for you
in PhotoShop.