Help with Ceiling Speakers, please

[PoulsboMom2Two]

i have four sets of in-ceiling speakers and one set of floor speakers. The floor speakers were in channel "A" and the ceiling ones were hooked to a speaker selector and to the receiver in channel "B" in a very old Yamaha receiver. All was good.

We rarely used the ceiling ones b/c the receiver is far from the remote speakers when we'd want sound.But we also realized that the knobs needed to be turned to max b/c the sounds was too soft.

Cut to this weekend where we bought a blue tooth receiver so we could turn it on remotely. We hooked speakers up and the sound is too low. I called about the selector box and was told it was not compatible (ohms something) and if the box was "bad" it could have been the problem all along...but good news is we no longer need a speaker selector since this has 7 channels (made for surround sound), Yamaha said.

Problem is even when we plug speakers directly to receiver, sound is too low.

 

[Karadjgne]

There's different things going on here. 'Surround sound' is a general term for ambience. It's designed to put you in the middle of the sound, so if you see a gunshot on the telly, you hear the sudden and immediate 'crack' of the shot in front of you (where it should be) but you'll still hear it's echos behind you. You being in the middle. By hooking the ceilings to surround, you get your 'mains' back by the telly, or receiver etc, but the ceiling only basically gets a small portion of sound because it's just getting the 'echos', not the full 'crack' of the gunshot. Most of the better receivers will have a separate set of speaker outputs labeled 'remote', which you'd have to switch between 'Main' and 'Remote'. Main speakers being the surround sound by the telly, and remote speakers being in another room. This is how you'd want your ceilings installed, as remote speakers don't work with surround and vice versa. Wife would be awful mad if the ceiling speakers worked when you were watching a movie and she was asleep upstairs. So they are separate.

Then there's wiring. House speakers generally are 8ohm. You have 4 ceilings, so generally that's 2 per line. With multiple speakers on a line, the ohms will be totally dependent on how they are wired, if they are wired in series (+ of one, - to the + of the next, - of 2 back to receiver) then ohms are added, so the receiver sees 16ohms, which takes twice the power to get the same volume as 1x 8ohm speaker. If they are wired in parallel, (+ of both together, - of both together) the receiver sees 1/x (that'd be 1/2 of 8ohm for you) or 4ohm, which takes half the power. Because ceiling speakers are generally low wattage rated, 15w-30w or so, sticking them on a 100w per channel receiver can be bad news, so I'm guessing they are wired in series to prevent damage, but that also means you need to crank up the volume to get them heard. Might be worth it to check.

In the mean time, you can test the veracity of the speakers themselves by simply testing them on 'Main' selection, but just on the plain 'Stereo' sound, not any Dolby or surround sound selection. If the speaker is wired in series, I'd swap it to parallel, it'd be the one closest to the receiver that needs checking.

Hope that helps some

 

[madmatt30]

Yamaha receivers have a multi-stereo or 'all channel stereo' setting.
This should enable full output on all speakers connected just in a stereo audio configuration.

As Karadjgne has already said , if you leave the audio setting bin a default surround , Dolby pro-logic or DSP setting it will reduce what audio (volume & content) is sent to speakers connected to anything other than the front left/right speaker outputs.

 

[PoulsboMom2Two]

Wow. This is good. First, I had called Yamaha about this receiver and they were the one that said no need for a speaker selector as it's got 7 spots for speakers. I am not really sure it has anything to do w/ "surround" except my 17 yo son who was hooking it up explained that this receiver was really originally designed if we had a TV hooked to it...

What comes out of the wall, btw, is four red sheathed cables each with four wires in it--two with stripes and two without.

Remember, they were too soft (after a while) when they went through the Niles SS4 speaker selector on the old A/B yamaha receiver BEFORE they were too soft with this 7 channel Yamaha receiver..

I will try one of the speakers direct to the input the two large floor speakers are connected as suggested. If it's too soft, it means something happened to the ceiling speakers?

THANKS!