Solved! Need Help w/ Built In Home Speakers (connecting in new home)

[sscott87]

New around here, and sorry if this isn’t the best thread to post this question to as I wasn’t certain which it fit. Doing a lot of researching to get this far and needing some more help! Just purchased this home, 12 years old, obviously never setup home speakers.

There’s x1 speaker EACH across x4 rooms (living room, master, study, and upstairs loft). Not a pair anywhere, just single speaker in each room.

Found the wiring behind blank faceplates. Appears the master and study both wired to the wall (separately in each room) with 2 conductor to go to volume control and 4 conductor from there (I assume this is the purpose anyway).

Some pulling of cables in the living room uncovered that everything is routed behind a blank faceplate.

What I don’t know/understand:

- what’s the 4-conductor wire’s purpose as each goes from living room to master/study walls? But only single speaker speakers there w/ 2-conductor. 4-conductor into volume control, 2-conductor our; perhaps the extra white/green is merely for future expansion? Or is there another obvious purpose I’m missing.

- in the living room, some wires were found to be a loop with no available end. Cutting them discovered that one powers the living room speaker and the other powers the loft, though the other cut half of each does nothing. Is this likely just excess wire stapled in the wall or might it be likely to have some other purpose?

- what’s the best method to provide audio to this setup, being that nothing is setup for stereo, left/right channels?

Receiver center channel —> speaker selector switch, at which point it wouldn’t matter whether each speaker is wired to left or right? Or amp w/ mono setting —> selector switch —> speakers?

Some other way?

Thank you in advance.

 

[hang-the-9]

Without knowing how the wiring was done by the prior owners or builders, anything is as much of a guess as you had. A lot of times installers do leave a service loop or extra cables for future use. It's like finding a rock inside a house, it may be used for throwing at someone, or holding down papers, or just decoration, or a dog just brought it in for no reason. Unless you where there when the person that owned the rock brought it in, anything else is a guess.

For wiring, you can just use a mono multi room amp, they make those for stores and such. Or use the existing wiring and run another wire along it to setup stereo speakers if you want.

 

[sscott87]

Would you have any recommendations or know a good source to find such? Not sure if I’m looking for the right thing as I’be only located 1 such online (mono amp for multiple zones or speakers).

This sounds like it’d be a better route than my thought to go mono amp —> speaker selector switch —> each of the 4. Tracking this would thus split the power though of the single channel 4 ways, although if a mono 100w amp, that’d still be plenty I’d assume? If it works how I assume. Lol

Without knowing how the wiring was done by the prior owners or builders, anything is as much of a guess as you had. A lot of times installers do leave a service loop or extra cables for future use. It's like finding a rock inside a house, it may be used for throwing at someone, or holding down papers, or just decoration, or a dog just brought it in for no reason. Unless you where there when the person that owned the rock brought it in, anything else is a guess.

For wiring, you can just use a mono multi room amp, they make those for stores and such. Or use the existing wiring and run another wire along it to setup stereo speakers if you want.

 

[americanaudiophile]

Sounds like a screwed up installation. The original owner may never have even used them from your description of the loop that was never cut.
I would suggest you get 1 or more Sonos Amps. A single one can be used in mono mode to play all four speakers with the same source with Sonos app volume control for all rooms at the same time. You could use an in wall volume control to adjust each room individually.
If you wanted different sources you would get additional Sonos Amps.

 

[sscott87]

Perfect. Short of cost. But good stuff isn’t cheap. I’m going to do some further investigating in the ceilings and such to see how feasible it may be to add an additional speaker in each room, with Plan B being the Sonos now. Unfortunately, there’s no attic space above these rooms to get a better idea of what was done or to easily add to it.

 

[americanaudiophile]

From your description is wouldn't be practical to pull new speaker wire unless you plan to do some remodeling anyway and can have any damage required to run the wires repaired at the same time.
A cheap way of setting it up would be to use a bluetooth receiver. That will put out stereo so you would need to convert its' output to mono

Simple Way to Convert Stereo to Mono

Simple Way to Convert Stereo to Mono: This is going to be a tutorial on how to take a stereo audio source from a phone for example and convert it to a mono signal to use with a mono amplifier or a two channel amplifier( I'll show you how to do this), and anything that needs a mono signa…

www.instructables.com

That could be use to feed mono amplifier boards that could drive each speaker.