New house! Built in speakers. WTH?!

OniNoKen

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Mar 13, 2010
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Greetings! We just moved into a new (to us) home, which was built in 2005. The living room has a set of in-wall speakers I'd like to hook up to a denon receiver. I've done this before, usually using banana clips and speaker wire. These speakers, however, appear to have RCA connectors, instead of two speaker wires.

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Now one of those is an unpatched network cable. I know what to do with that. Any suggestions on how to attach these speakers to a denon receiver? Or do I need to cut the rca's off and play guess the polarity with the speaker wire? Thanks for your time.
 

ien2222

Distinguished
Hey there,

Each wire should contain 2 copper wires just like you find in regular speaker wire. You should be able to unscrew the RCA plug in the middle to open it up, if the connections are not soldered you should be able to simply disconnect the wire from the plug, otherwise you can just cut the wire at the plug.

Then you would just hook it up to the AVR and test one at a time so you know what speaker goes to what color wire.
 
ien2222 has it right. Also make sure that the wire is not coax. Your receiver might not be happy with the capacitance of a long run of coax.
You can use a AA or AAA battery to test which wires goes to which speaker and to test for polarity. When the plus of the battery is connected to the plus terminal of the speaker the woofer will move out.
 

ttimberlak443

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Jan 11, 2014
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Would appear that I was incorrect about the RCA. After cutting one up (I have tons lying around) and after you all answering his question, I have learned that there are in fact two conductors. Looks like you learn something new everyday haha