So I'm in a new home an old client of mine just bought a few months ago and they had an amplifier overheating on the existing system. Bottom line I have a dead short on the red & green wires of a 16/4 speaker wire. Red/Black were used for right, White/Green (green being the negative) for left.

- Tested the speaker, good.
- Tested the amp, good.

So as I am a good few hours from any distributor and this house definitely cannot be rewired without significant damage, any ideas to wire a single stereo speaker using 3 wires without causing damage to any parts of the system?

Can I just use a single wire (in this case red/green) for the negative and jumper between left and right and then use the black and white as my left and right positives? Seems like it would work but I've never tried this before. My ohm meter shows I still get 8ohms to both positives with the negatives tied together but perhaps someone with a bit more technical knowledge can help answer this.

Thanks in advance.

Dont have your answer however just use ONE of the tweeters. You will still get woofer and tweeter just not both tweeters but just hooking up one. Did that before when I only had a stereo speaker when I needed a single, lol. worked.

As long as the amp is common ground you can do as you wish.

Disconnect speakers from amp and then check for continuity across the 2 negative terminals. If you show continuity then you are good to go. If not then the amp has isolated grounds and you will need to use a different amp.

Im pretty sure there was a post about this very thing in the past year or so. I did a quick search but couldn't find it.

maybe check the negative speaker terminals on the amp (using continuity test on a volt meter or equivalent) to see if they are common. If they are, I'm guessing it would work.

here it is.

[Link: remotecentral.com]

Rule #3: It's All Small Stuff As Long As You Don't Leave Out Any Of The Small Stuff:


OF THE AMPLIFIER. Small stuff, but it matters.


Yes, but you might get the wrong answer here. You could, for instance, use the signal generator half of a phone fox/hound set and get continuity even if there are transistors between the grounds and they are not at all common.

I'd disconnect the speakers, turn up the amp with a stereo signal or better yet a signal only on one channel, then check for voltage (audio) between grounds. Voltage means the grounds are not common. It's easy and accurate to listen for such voltage with a telephone test set in the MONITOR position.

RangerHome, hooking up only one tweeter means hooking up only one channel. I think he'strying to work out how not to do that, and these suggestions will get him that. The one you hooked up will sometimes sound hinky, depending on the separation of the stereo signal sent to it, because one channel will be missing.

You won't get bass and midrange of both channels unless you're suggesting wiring this up the way everyone is suggesting and then somehow disconnecting only the tweeter.

I just saw the thread title again. It says three wires.

This is probably obvious, but if you use both red and green as ground, yes, you electrically have three wires, but since they will then be twice the cross-section of one wire, it will act as though you have four wires.

I appreciate the help. I did check the amp and it was not isolated terminals so I made the Green and Red (since they are now one) into the negatives and the Black and White the positives and yee-haw... sounded great and the amp has been going strong without overheating for about 45 minutes now.

Really do appreciate all the tips. I did try to search but I'm on-site and couldn't find anything quick so I posted a new thread. Did the trick.