SPEAKER CONNECTIONS
Warning! To prevent possible personal injury and/or damage to your equipment, turn off
and unplug all equipment before making connections!
Preparation
Before attempting to make any connections it is best to look at the situation, get all the
necessary material together, and then make all the connections at once.
First, look at the back of your amplifier or receiver to determine what options it offers for
making connections. Amplifiers and receivers typically employ either 5-way binding
posts, spring-loaded terminals, or a combination of both for the speaker connections.
These speakers feature 5-way binding posts. A 5-way binding post can accept bare
speaker wire, spade plugs, pin plugs, and banana plugs, while spring loaded terminals
can accept either bare speaker wire or pin plugs. Refer to the documentation that came
with your amplifier or receiver to determine the maximum size/gauge speaker wire the
speaker terminals can accept. The 5-way binding posts on the speakers can accept
thicknesses wire up to 5AWG (5mm diameter).
While all options work with bare speaker wire, making bare speaker wire connections is
less than ideal. Using banana or pin plugs is highly recommended for several reasons.
Plugs are easier to connect, they don't run the risk of stray wire strands shorting the
connections, they allow for use of heavier gauge speaker wire in most cases, and it is
much easier to identify the polarity from a color coded ring on a plug than from a subtle
marking along the length of a wire.
Regardless of how you choose to make the connection you will need some speaker
wire. The thickness, or gauge, of the wire needed depends on the distance over which
the signal will be sent. The following table serves as a guideline for determining the
minimum wire gauge to use:
Distance (feet)
8 ohms 4 ohms
18 AWG
10
5
16 AWG
20
10
14 AWG
35
18
12 AWG
60
30
10 AWG
100
50
In general you should use the heaviest gauge speaker wire that will fit in the connectors
(remember, the smaller the AWG number, the heavier/thicker the wire).Using banana or
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