doubling the power?

[rpm427sc]

I have an older reciever that is putting out about 50watts per channel. I only have two speakers hooked up to it and the reciever has 4 speaker outputs. Can I take the + of the two right channels and put them into the right speaker and the two - of the same channels and put them into the speaker, and do the same for the left speaker? Will that double the power and not fry anything?

[JohnA]

You will not increase the power going to the speakers. You will be wasting your time if your speaker cables are already large enough.

John

[rpm427sc]

But i will be taking power from 4 channels instead of 2

[jtkinney]

John's correct. If it's like any reciever that I have seen, there are only two amplifier channels, that are then split by the speaker switch. Hope this helps.

Jim

[discorules]

It will be a time wasting effort. With stereo amps and receivers, there are only two amplifiers and 50 wpc in your case is it. If you add a second set of speakers to the receiver, you may get little more power overall but at the likely expense of a little more distortion. This is hardly worth the effort however. Your best bet might be to step up to higher sensitivity speakers. In that case you are at the right place, Klipsch.

[Klipschguy]

You're receiver has only two channels, period. When you hook up a second pair of speakers to the "B" speaker outputs of your receiver, you're just hooking up another pair of speakers in series or parallel (depending on the wiring of your receiver) with the first set of speakers (which are hooked up to the right and left channels), then a switch allows you to choose one or both speakers. It is basically like taking a wire and running it off the back of a speaker (which is already hooked up to the receiver) and jumping it over to run another speaker - except the receiver uses a switch. Hooking your speakers to the A and B output is redundant and does nothing. It's just like running two wires out of either the A or the B speaker outputs. No power is gained except a VERY VERY SLIGHT amount from basically using thicker speaker wire.

Regards,

Andy

[rpm427sc]

It is a 4 channel reciever ( 2 front and two back). If I bridge the 4 channels to create 2, it should work right?

[Ray Garrison]

It might, or might not, break something.

Can you feed the same signal into the front and rear channels? That is, is there a line level input dedicated to each of the four channels, or does the receiver take a two channel input and do some manipulation to generate the four outputs? If this is and older four channel receiver from back in the Quad era, and it's expecting some sort of matrixed input that it uses to create the rear channels, I don't see how you'd get the rear channel outputs to produce the same signal coming out of the front channels. If it's some sort of Dolby Surround type thingie, then you're not going to get any (or at least not much) output from the rear channels with most two channel sources, and what you DO get will be quite different than the signal coming out of the front channels.

Assuming for a moment that it's possible to get both front and rear channels to output the same signal, if you wire both sets of outputs to the same speaker, you are connecting the outputs together. Unless the output devices are VERY closely matched, one of them is going to be driving voltage and current INTO the other. If this is a robustly engineered box, it might not do anything more than get warm. More likely, you'll blow one or more of the output transistors, eventually.

If you can bi-amp the speakers (they have separate binding posts for high and low frequencies, or you can modify them so that they do), then this would work very well by connecting the front and rear channels to the high and low pass sections on one channel, and the same for the other. Again, assuming that both front and rear outputs are equally powered, that is.

Ray

------------------

Music is art

Audio is engineering

[rpm427sc]

There is main speaker right and left, then there is remote speaker right and left

[Klipschguy]

Sorry, I didn't know it was a 50 X 4 (pretty rare). Still, I wouldn't recommend hooking two channels to 1 speaker, unless you're interested in a "I didn't like that receiver, anyway" experiment.

Warm, happy, TGIF regards,

Andy

[dougdrake2]

"There is main speaker right and left, then there is remote speaker right and left."

Not to cast any further doubt on your statement about it being a 4-channel receiver, but the verbiage "remote speaker" simply implies to me that you have 2 amplifiers (1 for each stereo channel) being split to drive 2 speakers each, one "main" and one "remote", as in a second pair of speakers elsewhere in the house. Good luck, and proceed with caution...

DD2

[TheEAR]

"It is a 4 channel reciever ( 2 front and two back). If I bridge the 4 channels to create 2, it should work right?"

Now if its a FOUR channel receiver you cannot simply bridge the primary and secondary channels.Some power amps are designed to allow bridging.If its NOT and you "bridge" you will have problems.

Problems can vary from protection cutting the amp or in the least happy case your reciever will be a dead reciever(reciever with no amp is no reciever at all).

For example you can bridge power amps like the Celeste(all models from 4070 to 4250SE)and you cannot bridge any reciever I know of.If you "bridge" a Denon then...uh well GOODBYE warranty and hello problems.

Just dont bridge the amp.

May I ask what make and model is your reciever?

This may help(I am 99.99% sure you cant bridge it anyway)to cross off the list the "bridging".

TheEAR(s) Now theears