sub hookup... (1 Viewer)

[JenL]

before i spend more then i probably should on real ht equipment i thought i would do an experiment with an old stereo reciever i had laying around....i hooked it up and used the radioshack spl meter i picked up with video essentials to set the left and right speakers correctly....hearing the improvement over just the tv speakers almost made me want to begin the ht process but i wanted to get a better feel so i want to hook a sub up to this reciever...the reciever has no preouts and this is a powered sub but the reciever does have tape out l/r and record out l/r....could i take a l and r from there and put it into the input of the sub? reciever is a kenwood kr-2300 and the sub is a sub from cambridge that my son used before he went away to college.

 

[Bob McElfresh]

Hi Jen. Welcome to HTF!
There are 2 ways to wire up a self-powered sub into your system.
Traditional/2 Channel: Your sub should have L/R speaker wire inputs and L/R speaker wire outputs. You run speaker wires from your old receiver to the inputs. The sub will strip off the sounds it can handle and pass the rest on to the output terminals. You run speaker wires from this to your L/R speakers.
(This is the way you should try and wire YOUR sub)
Modern: Most modern receivers have a special RCA jack called "LFE". You run a single cable (with RCA plugs, not speaker wire) from this jack to the matching jack on the sub.
Most receivers will now let you define your main speakers as LARGE or SMALL. If you tell it that your center speaker is SMALL, it will strip the low-frequency that should have gone to the center and send it to your sub. It will also send the ".1" sounds from a DVD player to the sub.
This way, you can have 5 small speakers, or 5 large speakers, or a mix, and the SUB can take-over where it needs to for your system.
Hope this helps.