Speaker Wiring

[superblue24]

Hi All,

So I've bought some Sahara Whiteboard speakers second hand for an awards night tomorrow.

They turned up last night with no bloody cables.....Which I think is right, but I hadn't thought about at that time. anyway.....

There is one Active Speaker with a built in amp. and one Passive Speaker. The Passive speaker has just to connection holes, one black and one red....They are not built for anything to plug into, but they seem more like clamps for naked wire.

The Active speaker has one Output hole which I'm guessing is what needs to go to the Passive Speaker to make the whole affair feasible.....I went to Maplin and was sold 20M of "Loudspeaker Cable", a white phono plug, a red phono plug and then a "2-into-1" phono adapter. I was told I need to run the cables into the red and white plugs and then plug those into the 2-in-1 and then plug that into the Active output. The other end needs to be hardwired into the Passive speaker....That sound right?

Also, does anyone know which wire goes into which plug? It looks like one cable has a black stripe on it, and the other is slightly thicker and white.....

Any advice would be helpful.....I kind of have an idea of what I'm doing to the point of my previous paragraph. I'm going to do it when I get home, but dont want to get stumped and then be asking this late tonight when everyone is out on the p155 and getting in a massive flap!

Cheers

 

[Pubey]

Ok it sounds like you've got the right stuff. it doesn't really matter what cables you use. I'm guessing the output from the active speaker is a minijack, and your connector looks like this

Just hook it up and away you go, you can't really get it wrong. Your phono plugs will unscrew and you just clamp the wire in when you screw them back up.

 

[superblue24]

Ok it sounds like you've got the right stuff. it doesn't really matter what cables you use. I'm guessing the output from the active speaker is a minijack, and your connector looks like this

Just hook it up and away you go, you can't really get it wrong. Your phono plugs will unscrew and you just clamp the wire in when you screw them back up.

Got this

 

[superblue24]

Apparently that one plugs into the Active on the 1 side and the 2 side goes out to the wires and into the Passive?

 

[Pubey]

Could well do, I don't know the speakers but a mini-jack would be more likely IMO. If it's not right you'll obviously need to nip to maplin to get the other one.

 

[superblue24]

Is the mini jack the one that goes into your earphone jack on like an iPod?

 

[Pubey]

Is the mini jack the one that goes into your earphone jack on like an iPod?

yeah exactly.

 

[WightShrimper]

The stripe on the cable is just there so you don't 'cross wire' them, There is nothing different about the two sides, so basically, if you wire the red phono plug to the black stripe side, when you clamp the other end to the passive speaker, you will know to clamp the black stripe side into the red clamp.

 

[superblue24]

hmmmm, OK....Maybe I need to buy one of the same but with a mini jack just to be sure....

Do you know if these speakers will do the job? Room is about the size of the West Stand Burger Cafe and kitchen combined. There will be about 30 attendees and the speaker power is 16W x 2...Separation (whatever that means) 35dB and Signal/Noise ratio = 80dB....?

Thanks

 

[Davros]

It depends on if it is just for background music and speaking, or for a jolly old party in a chatty room. My guess with only 32W (comb) at your disposal, it will be ok for speaking etc, but if the room got loud and you wanted to play music, the level that you would want to go to would probably lead to distortion espcially with something bass-y.