speaker wire polarity

[tooskinny]

Years ago I ran speaker wire threw my drop ceiling for my rear speakers. I decided to try a different pair and noticed that the wires have no markings for postive or negative. Each one looks the exact same. No difference in color or anything. How can I determine which is postive or negative?

[Jason]

The way we used to do this back in my car audio days was to hook the speaker wire up to a 9 volt battery. When you place the positive wire on the positive battery terminal and the negative on the negative, the speaker cone will move OUT. If you reverse the leads, the cone will move IN.

[tooskinny]

Kind of lost me. Do I use the wires on the receiver or the speaker to connect to the battery?

[Jason]

Wires from the speaker. After you determine which is pos/neg, then put a piece of tape over one of them for future reference.

I had to do this at our current house. There were in-ceiling surrounds and the wires in the back of the equipment cabinent weren't marked.

[tooskinny]

Ok. I diconnected both wires from the speaker. Put one wire on the postive of the battery and touch the other wire to both positve and negative post on the speaker. Didn't see it do anything.

[NekoAudio]

Maybe something a little different.

At your receiver, hook up a battery to the two speaker wires. At the other end, where you'd attach to your speakers, use a multimeter to check the voltage. One direction will show positive DC voltage. The other will show negative DC voltage.

Now you know which wire at your receiver end matches up with which wire on the speaker end.

[tooskinny]

I was trying it wrong. I hook up the speaker wires from the receiver to the battery then touch the wires for the speaker to see how the cone moves. Going to give it a try today.

Thanks for all your help

[Ray3]

The other thing you can do is put pieces of black electrical tape on the ends of the same wire and leave the other wire untaped. Then make sure the ends of the black taped wire go from black connections to black connections and the untaped wire ends from red to red.

[tooskinny]

I used the battery trick and it worked. Marked each wire with a marker.

[Jason]

I used the battery trick and it worked. Marked each wire with a marker.

:kewl:

[tooskinny]

:kewl:

Thank you so much......