I am changing from an AEGO home entertainment system to a Panasonic SC BTT270 one and due to awkward cable runs I want to reuse the cables to the rear speakers. My problem is that the original cables are flat ones ending in a male RCA connection and the Panasonic speakers require two bare wire connections. Can anyone suggest a way of connecting the male RCA connections (without cutting them) to the Panasonic speakers?

Female RCA to bare wire should work?

Something like this but with female RCA or use it with a female to female coupler.

http://lh4.googleusercontent.com/pub...xANsYWw31xyaYA

You will need to trace the wires back so you know which is + and - for the speaker connections - The centre pin is generally positive, the outer case negative. If you connect the wrong way round the speakers will be out of phase.

Thanks, I have an old female RCA connector with a cable on it and on stripping this it seems to be a single centre wire insulated and surrounded by what seems to be a sort of shielding wire. Would this 2 in 1 wire be the same as twin speaker wire with as you say the centre being positive and the outer shielding wire being the negative? If by any chance that the centre is negative which I doubt, would it damage the speakers if they were connected wrongly.

Is there any reason for not chopping the plugs off the cable?

Anyway. What you have is coaxial audio cable. It is more normally used for low level signals, eg between a CD player and amplifier. Not usually for speaker leads. Speaker leads are more often two identical wires and usually thicker than the type of cable you describe. More like twin core mains in fact (which is often used for speaker cables)

On a RCA plug the inner pin is +ve and the outer ring -ve normally. With coaxial cables the inner core is +ve and the outer screen -ve.

Connecting speakers the wrong way round simple reverses the way the cone moves, ie it goes out when it should go in and vice versa. However if you feed the same signal to all speakers they should all move the same way as each other. If one is wired incorrectly you get a poorly defined sound image. So if you have a stereo pair (to keep it simple) then feeding the same signal to both should result in a sound image that seems to be sharply defined half way between them. If one is wired in reverse to the other the image appears smeared between the speakers.

The cables I have at present are flat and about 3/8th inch wide. I'm not really sure how they are constructed and to cut the connectors off would probably render them useless if for any reason I would be removing them. It looks as if the best solution will be to run new cables. Thanks for your contribution.

A cable need not be rendered useless if you chop a plug off it. You can always solder a new one on the end. Once the plug is off you can see how it is constructed.

If it is flat then there is a chance it is two core in an overall sheath. So if you cut back the outer sheath you may find two separate wires inside, like two core mains. It is then just a matter of working out which is +ve and which -ve.

a small battery with a bit of the wire would push out the speaker if positive was indeed positive