N

Nmccracken12

Audiophyte
I am helping a friend wire some in ceiling speakers throughout his house. I’ve set up two 5.1 rooms and I am now moving on to the rooms with single DVC speakers. The issue I am having is that the original wiring running to the speakers that I will replace and move to better locations is 16/2. I have put forth a lot of effort and time to try and find a way to pull 16/4, but it’s just not possible. It’s all subfloor underneath the second story. I can’t use the old wires to pull because they stapled them to studs frequently. Is there any possible way to make this work with the 16/2? Or should I change the game plan?
 
BMXTRIX

BMXTRIX

Audioholic Warlord
Change the game plan. If the original wiring was for mono speakers, then that's the wiring that's there. There is no reason to upgrade them to DVC speakers really. Depends on the room they are in if it matters at all. If the room they are in was designed to have two speakers, then just put two speakers into the room and you can run them in stereo, or dual mono. Not sure how many rooms are throughout the home, or what the overall wiring and audio plan was from the start.
 
N

Nmccracken12

Audiophyte
Change the game plan. If the original wiring was for mono speakers, then that's the wiring that's there. There is no reason to upgrade them to DVC speakers really. Depends on the room they are in if it matters at all. If the room they are in was designed to have two speakers, then just put two speakers into the room and you can run them in stereo, or dual mono. Not sure how many rooms are throughout the home, or what the overall wiring and audio plan was from the start.
The original system is very old and there was only one speaker in each room, but they were not DVC. That’s why we were trying to make it work with DVC. I wasn’t sure if there was a way to wire the DVC with the original wiring and have it work.
 
highfigh

highfigh

Seriously, I have no life.
I am helping a friend wire some in ceiling speakers throughout his house. I’ve set up two 5.1 rooms and I am now moving on to the rooms with single DVC speakers. The issue I am having is that the original wiring running to the speakers that I will replace and move to better locations is 16/2. I have put forth a lot of effort and time to try and find a way to pull 16/4, but it’s just not possible. It’s all subfloor underneath the second story. I can’t use the old wires to pull because they stapled them to studs frequently. Is there any possible way to make this work with the 16/2? Or should I change the game plan?
If you can't run a second cable, set the distributed audio to mono and abandon the DVC speakers or wire them in series unless the amplifier will be OK with 4 Ohms.

Are you trying to control the single speakers separately from the 5.1 AVR? If so, you might consider using a multi-Zone amplifier, so each speaker will be powered by its own channel, which eliminates having to deal with wiring connections that make a stereo amplifier happy, which almost never does. You'll be able to set the level of each zone separately and it will live longer.

Rewiring can be done, but it's not necessarily easy- some of us have made that a specialty in our careers while many just walk away from that kind of job.
 
N

Nmccracken12

Audiophyte
If you can't run a second cable, set the distributed audio to mono and abandon the DVC speakers or wire them in series unless the amplifier will be OK with 4 Ohms.

Are you trying to control the single speakers separately from the 5.1 AVR? If so, you might consider using a multi-Zone amplifier, so each speaker will be powered by its own channel, which eliminates having to deal with wiring connections that make a stereo amplifier happy, which almost never does. You'll be able to set the level of each zone separately and it will live longer.

Rewiring can be done, but it's not necessarily easy- some of us have made that a specialty in our careers while many just walk away from that kind of job.
Thank you. I got him a 3 zone receiver. Zone 1 for the surround system, zone 2 for outside, and zone 3 for the whole home going through a speaker selector.

Zone 1 was the room that I quickly realized this isn’t going to be fun. I made it work by cutting a hole in the room behind where the living room was so I could drill the header and run the wires up. It worked after hours of frustration and one really big mess.

I did see that the receiver says 4ohms - 16 ohms on the front of it. I have some knowledge in the wiring and installation area, but not so much in this series/parallel and ohms area. If the receiver is good with 4 ohms how would I hook the DVC up to run properly? Or can I still not do that? Does it matter that all the DVC’s will go to a speaker selector and not direct to the receiver?
 
BMXTRIX

BMXTRIX

Audioholic Warlord
You should not be using DVC speakers in surround sound areas at all. The entire point of DVC speakers is to get stereo from a point speaker location. Like a laundry room or something like that.

If you only have two conductors, then you can only send mono, or one channel (either left, or right) to that speaker. If you use a DVC 8 ohm speaker, it will operate at 4 ohms or 16 ohms depending on how you wire it. But, you aren't sending it stereo. Just mono and I would typically use the pre-outs of the AV receiver and set it to mono, or use a stereo to mono summing adapter, then send it to a decent single channel of an amplifier, or a multi-channel amplifier on the BUS input to that every distributed zone could get audio properly.

Since nothing can benefit from DVC speakers, I would not use DVC speakers anywhere at all to begin with. I would still run everything as mono that isn't getting proper stereo to the room. Not sure who did the original installation, since music has been stereo for more than the 20+ years I've been in the business and another 20 years before that. Basically, anyone that designs a distributed audio system, and doesn't plan for stereo, at a minimum, in each zone, does not know what they are doing, or they planned specifically for mono in each zone from the start, which is perfectly acceptable if that was the plan. Nothing really wrong with mono audio for background music in a room for casual listening.
 
highfigh

highfigh

Seriously, I have no life.
Thank you. I got him a 3 zone receiver. Zone 1 for the surround system, zone 2 for outside, and zone 3 for the whole home going through a speaker selector.

Zone 1 was the room that I quickly realized this isn’t going to be fun. I made it work by cutting a hole in the room behind where the living room was so I could drill the header and run the wires up. It worked after hours of frustration and one really big mess.

I did see that the receiver says 4ohms - 16 ohms on the front of it. I have some knowledge in the wiring and installation area, but not so much in this series/parallel and ohms area. If the receiver is good with 4 ohms how would I hook the DVC up to run properly? Or can I still not do that? Does it matter that all the DVC’s will go to a speaker selector and not direct to the receiver?
You completely missed the part about using a multi-channel amplifier, so each speaker/zone will be separate. If you use a speaker selector, it needs to maintain correct impedance and all of the power from that AVR's zone is shared, so at max output, assuming 8 speakers and 100W/channel, each speaker will receive 25W. Fine if the amplifier is happy doing that over a long period but usually not.
 
N

Nmccracken12

Audiophyte
You should not be using DVC speakers in surround sound areas at all. The entire point of DVC speakers is to get stereo from a point speaker location. Like a laundry room or something like that.

If you only have two conductors, then you can only send mono, or one channel (either left, or right) to that speaker. If you use a DVC 8 ohm speaker, it will operate at 4 ohms or 16 ohms depending on how you wire it. But, you aren't sending it stereo. Just mono and I would typically use the pre-outs of the AV receiver and set it to mono, or use a stereo to mono summing adapter, then send it to a decent single channel of an amplifier, or a multi-channel amplifier on the BUS input to that every distributed zone could get audio properly.

Since nothing can benefit from DVC speakers, I would not use DVC speakers anywhere at all to begin with. I would still run everything as mono that isn't getting proper stereo to the room. Not sure who did the original installation, since music has been stereo for more than the 20+ years I've been in the business and another 20 years before that. Basically, anyone that designs a distributed audio system, and doesn't plan for stereo, at a minimum, in each zone, does not know what they are doing, or they planned specifically for mono in each zone from the start, which is perfectly acceptable if that was the plan. Nothing really wrong with mono audio for background music in a room for casual listening.
Thanks again. The second paragraph is what I was wanting. I didn’t run DVC’s in his surround areas. I used klipsch 3800s and 5800s in the two surround rooms we did. One surround room is separate from this system I was asking about. The zone 3 whole home was going to have DVC’s because it was an extra speaker for the kitchen, which is right off of the surround area, to give better direct sound in the kitchen, his small office, and the master bathroom. Those rooms were DVC.
 

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