Help ! i have speakers which have two terminals ( lf/ hf)on the back of each.?

Question

one is pos and one is neg and there are bridge gold plates joining to the other two red/ black terminals on each speaker.i have hooked up wire to the pos and neg .is this correct? or should i get those two to four wire split cables to plug in?or do the extra terminals on the back only matter if i'm using two amps? which i'm not, i only have one..arghhhh!

Answer 1

It sounds like you have speakers that have an input for low frequencies and one for high frequencies. These separate inputs would be used if you had a standalone electronic crossover that would drive separate amplifiers for the low and high frequencies. This is an audiophile thing, where you wouldn't get intermodulation distortion between the low and high frequencies being driven by the same amplifier.

The bridge is there to have the the full spectrum of high and low frequencies (single amplifier) go to all of the drivers in the speaker via the speaker's built-in crossover.

Answer 2

Paul in San Diego is correct.  The bridge between the two sets of connectors on the speaker is for bi-wiring.  Unless you have a specific piece of equipment for crossing over I would leave the gold bridge on the speaker posts.

Answer 3

4 connecters in a row? red black red black and the two middle ones are connected by a bridge?? you would only need to connected to the two outer connections (should be 1 red 1 black) to enable the speaker to run off 1 amp. if you had an amp for hf and one for lf then you could run them seperately

Answer 4

im probably not much use, but to my (little) knowledge, i would assume LF is low frequency, and HF is high frequency...i don't really know.

Answer 5

Paul is right but I will expand a little...

A lot of speakers have two sets of input terminals.  Inside a speaker is a small electronic circuit called a crossover, which separates the different sound frequencies (low bass and high treble) and routes these to the right driver (i.e, a big 8" bass driver gets the lower frequencies while the little 1" tweeter just gets the high frequencies it can actually generate).

The two sets of inputs are there so you can individually wire the bass and treble drivers.  Audiophiles believe that using different wires to each will result in less distortion due to the physics of currents travelling through wire.  As Paul said, they also believe in using different amplifiers for each frequency band for the same reason.

For most users however, you don't need or want to use two sets of cables / amps for your home theatre or stereo system, so you can leave the bridge plates in between the two sets of terminals and just plug your cables into either of the inputs.

For curiosity's sake, take the bridge plates off and plug wires into just the LF or HF inputs - on the LF you will only hear a muddy, bassy playback, on the HF you will of course hear tinny voices, cymbals etc etc.