4 Conductor to 2 Conductor wire colors

[Truett]

I have run 14/4 speaker cable to 21 home theater speakers. I will be twisting two colors and two colors together to use as two conductor. Any suggestions on the colors to twist together? White, black, red, green.

 

[mono-bloc]

Red Black // White Green

 

[highfigh]

Standard use in the Cinstom Integration business is Red +/Black- and White +/Green -

If nobody else will work on the system, the pairs you pick won't matter but if people who install this stuff as their job work on it, it really shouldn't matter because a good installer will always check the wires for pairing and for shorts before they connect them to the amplifier(s).

That said, if the future installers AREN'T the good ones, do yourself a favor and use the color pairings I posted, so the installers can't try to blame the amplifier when one or more channels stop working.

 

[mtrycrafts]

Is this a home installation, with 21 speakers?
How long are the longer runs? You may not need to double up on wire.

 

[highfigh]

I have run 14/4 speaker cable to 21 home theater speakers. I will be twisting two colors and two colors together to use as two conductor. Any suggestions on the colors to twist together? White, black, red, green.

The question of how you'll distribute the signal to 21 speakers needs to be answered and it needs to be done properly or your amplifier(s) will die. You can't just connect all of the positive wires together, all negative wires together and pound them into the amplifier's speaker terminals. Also, using speaker volume controls isn't the best way if each doesn't connect to its own channels. Using an impedance maintainer won't work if you run them at high power levels and you need to remember that whatever the amplifier is rated for power, the speakers will share that so a 100W/channel amplifier connected to 20 speakers means each will see 5 Watts if they're all identical and none have a volume control that changes the signal. In addition, all volume controls cause a bit of loss- more, or less, depending on the design (purely resistive or using an auto-former).