Old Stereo Speakers' cables won't fit into AV receiver

Question

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The speakers have cables coming out of them instead of connectors for RCA cables. How can I connect these speakers to the receiver?

Answer 1

I am suprised your receiver does not have spring terminals to attach bare speaker wire.

If your receiver has RCA connectors for the speaker outputs, then you will need to buy some RCA connectors or RCA cables to attach the wires.  You will need to solder the RCA connectors, or cut off the RCA ends on a cable leaving some wire to spare and then splice the wires to the connectors.  No soldering needed that way.

  

Answer 2

Actually it's common for speakers to have some kind of clamp or s***w to connect them with blank wires or banana plugs. RCA usually is used for audio connections between devices. If your reciever only has RCA out connectors (and not loud speaker out ... like clamps / screws as noted before) chances are it doesn't have a built-in amplifier.

However (!) some companies built (and still build) complete home cinema systems using proprietary plugs or "abusing" rca plugs for that purpose. (For example I know Logitech uses such RCA plugs on some of their PC speaker systems to connect the stereo speakers to the subwoofer with its built-in amplifier.) If you are sure this scenario is the case for your home cinema reciever you could in theory cut of the rca plug on one side of the cable and try to connect the blank wires ... well ... in theory. Practically this is not as easy as normal speaker cables just have two wires. RCA plugs use coaxial cables meaing the shielding around the center wire takes the place of the second wire. If the company just did this on themselves (as in "abusing" the standard as a speaker connector for which it was not designed) in theory it could be + or - ... depends on what they felt like. ;)

If you don't want to 'fiddle' something yourself (don't want to cut up your cables with RCA connectors) you can look in the car-hifi segment. There they have pre-made speaker wire to rca dapters because they sometimes need it the other way around: They have car amplifiers with RCA in connectors that take amplified signals which might come from a different amplifier that puts the stuff out on normal speaker wires.