FrankOutdoor5 Posted May 30, 2019 Share Posted May 30, 2019 Last year, I bought a single Klipsch AWR 650 Outdoor rock speaker for my patio. I have a speaker switch with 3 other speaker pairs attached. For some reason, I cannot get any real volume on the rock speaker, but I do on the 3 other pair. I wired the single rock speaker as required by the manufacturer. Any thoughts? Thanks much. Frank Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garyrc Posted May 31, 2019 Share Posted May 31, 2019 6 hours ago, FrankOutdoor5 said: Last year, I bought a single Klipsch AWR 650 Outdoor rock speaker for my patio. I have a speaker switch with 3 other speaker pairs attached. For some reason, I cannot get any real volume on the rock speaker, but I do on the 3 other pair. I wired the single rock speaker as required by the manufacturer. Any thoughts? Thanks much. Frank Hi Frank, Welcome to the forum! Check all connections for tightness and the elimination of corrosion, etc. Does the rock speaker play by itself, or at the same time as the others? If at the same time, the other speakers may merely be more efficient, therefore louder. The rock speaker has a sensitivity of 94 dB@1watt@1 meter. If that measurement was taken the same way as with other Klipsch speakers, that would mean 94dB@2.83Volts@1M with the help of room walls, floor and ceiling, and 90 db@2.83V@1M without that help. Either 94 or 90 is not very efficient for a Klipsch speaker (e.g., in a typical room, the Cornwall III is 102 dB, and the Klipschorn 105 dB). If there is a flat surface in your outdoor area that is NEAR where the listeners will be, such as the outside of a garage wall or house wall, it might be helpful to back the rock up against that wall, to provide some boundary gain (providing all speakers in the rock face front). When you turn up the main volume knob, does the volume go up? Since your other speakers are in pairs, I assume you are feeding them in stereo, and that your speaker switch has "stereo in" and has several "stereo outs." Is that correct? Two speakers wired in parallel are reduced to half their impedance, in which case two nominally 8 ohm speakers, present a 4 ohm load to the amplifier, which some amplifiers don't like. If it is possible to play TWO OR MORE speakers at once from the SAME channel, your speaker switching box should take measures to present an 8 ohm load to your amplifier, either by using resistors or by some kind of parallel by series wiring, or other means, if there are any. Outdoors, every doubling of distance reduces volume by about 6 dB. Indoors, every doubling reduces volume by more like 3 dB. Good Luck! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oicu812 Posted May 31, 2019 Share Posted May 31, 2019 19 hours ago, garyrc said: Hi Frank, Welcome to the forum! Check all connections for tightness and the elimination of corrosion, etc. Does the rock speaker play by itself, or at the same time as the others? If at the same time, the other speakers may merely be more efficient, therefore louder. The rock speaker has a sensitivity of 94 dB@1watt@1 meter. If that measurement was taken the same way as with other Klipsch speakers, that would mean 94dB@2.83Volts@1M with the help of room walls, floor and ceiling, and 90 db@2.83V@1M without that help. Either 94 or 90 is not very efficient for a Klipsch speaker (e.g., in a typical room, the Cornwall III is 102 dB, and the Klipschorn 105 dB). If there is a flat surface in your outdoor area that is NEAR where the listeners will be, such as the outside of a garage wall or house wall, it might be helpful to back the rock up against that wall, to provide some boundary gain (providing all speakers in the rock face front). When you turn up the main volume knob, does the volume go up? Since your other speakers are in pairs, I assume you are feeding them in stereo, and that your speaker switch has "stereo in" and has several "stereo outs." Is that correct? Two speakers wired in parallel are reduced to half their impedance, in which case two nominally 8 ohm speakers, present a 4 ohm load to the amplifier, which some amplifiers don't like. If it is possible to play TWO OR MORE speakers at once from the SAME channel, your speaker switching box should take measures to present an 8 ohm load to your amplifier, either by using resistors or by some kind of parallel by series wiring, or other means, if there are any. Outdoors, every doubling of distance reduces volume by about 6 dB. Indoors, every doubling reduces volume by more like 3 dB. Good Luck! Gary, good list! I bet that took a while to type up... Take the offending speaker, and connect it directly to your receiver / amp. If the volume issue still exists, you know it is the speaker itself. If the problem moves along with the speaker, time to try fixing it or replacing if necessary. If the speaker works normally when connected directly, you will know that the issue lies in the switch, or the wiring. Like Gary asked in his post, are you connecting more than one speaker to each channel? If so, like he said, if you place two 8 ohm speakers on the same channel, it does change the resistance by half. If you do 3 speakers, the receiver is most likely seeing a 2 ohm impedance . Most amps will NOT like that. They have to put out more power than normal to run the speakers. (I realize that resistance and impedance are not quite the same thing, but for this conversation either will fit.) If you are using a 5.1 / 7.1 home theater unit as your receiver / amplifier, normally they have a setting that allows you to take 2 channel stereo input, and put that out across all channels. This way each speaker can have it's own channel and all the needed power. Good luck with it! Let us know how it shakes out, would ya? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FrankOutdoor5 Posted May 31, 2019 Author Share Posted May 31, 2019 All - Sincere thanks for your responses and guidance. Will follow the suggestions. Have a great weekend. Frank Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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