Well, that didn’t go as smoothly as I expected. At least the speakers are finally up.
I hooked up the speakers late this week, with only a modicum of difficulty. Yes, the good news was that I had pre-wired the back speakers by running the extended speaker wiring back in February. That was the good news. However, I apparently forgot a few other things:
- Each speaker needs to have the proper positive and negative terminals connected to the AV receiver’s corresponding positive and negative connections. While I had done this for the original surround back speaker that I owned back in February, I failed to mark up the other wire. So late Thursday night, I was staring at a wire with identical two strands, and no way to easily know which goes into which terminal.
- To be safe, I decided to test the wiring with the old surround back speaker. No sounds during the MCACC testing/setup. Twice. What’s up? Following a hunch, I checked the wiring connection at the back of the AV receiver. Lo and behold, I was too lazy in February 2011 to actually hook up the other side of the pre-wired speaker wire at the AV receiver end. So, I had to spend time removing the wire insulation on that side, and trying to hook it up to the proper AV receiver pos/neg terminals.
I finally got it all working fine. You can see how it looks below, but that’s not the end of it. As you’ll notice below, the painting is now not centered, so I’ll have to move that over 16″ to the left. I will also need to pick up some clips to secure the speaker wire to the wall, and make it neater.
Getting the surround speakers installed