®
12
P
antages
g3
™
www.audiocontrol.com
Audio hook-up
If you’re an installation veteran, this may seem repetitive, but some things
can never be repeated too many times.
1) Turn off ALL components before making any connections.
2) When making connections, designate RED RCA plugs as RIGHT and
WHITE, BLACK, or GREY plugs as LEFT. In fact, this is a good idea for
ALL signal connections made in your audio system. The key is consistency.
Stick with the same color-coding and you’ll reduce possible problems.
3) Whenever possible, keep power cords away from signal cables to prevent
induced hum. This is especially important if you bundle the cables to keep
the installation neat looking.
4) Use quality interconnect cables. We’re not going to get into the debate
about whether $100/meter cables improve the sound, but we know from
experience that really, REALLY cheap cables can cause a multitude of
problems. They tend to break inside or corrode, causing a loss of signal or
hum. They also have poor shielding.
5) If you need to run the audio cables more than 20 feet you should consid-
er using the balanced XLR inputs. This will provide better noise rejection
against nasty things like hum, spikes, local talk radio, etc. If your surround
processor doesn’t have balanced outputs, the AudioControl BLD-10 bal-
anced line driver is an excellent way to convert unbalanced RCA audio
outputs to a balanced signal (see the appendix for details).
Speaker Hook-up
The same rule applies to the speaker wires as the audio connections. Es-
tablish a standard connection color code and stick with it. One conductor
of the speaker wire is normally marked by a different color (silver versus
copper) or there is a ribbing on one side. Typically this marked conductor is
used for the positive (+) speaker leads. Of course the really good wire has
Positive and Negative printed right onto the wire jacket.
Your choice of speaker wire gauge and the length
of the runs also affects the speaker impedance
load presented to the amplifiers. As you can see
in this table, even fairly short speaker runs can
have a very significant resistance if you use a
smaller wire gauge. The downside of this re-
sistance in the wire is that you waste the total
power available to the speakers.
H
ookIng
uP
Y
our
s
Ystem
