Originally Posted by
Bah Humbug
Speakers are all in the ceiling. They're sad little ones which may at some point be replaced, or not. Music is almost non-existent through them; it's 99% for TV. Don't really give a crap about directional at all; the thing that gets me is when cheap built-in speakers get a vibration on certain frequencies. My TV in Boulder did it for Ron Swanson's voice, and my next one did it... I forget what that one buzzed for. Right now we're using a basic Yamaha soundbar from Costco and it's fine, but it seems a shame to not use the speakers if they're there.
The wall has a mess of wires coming out. There are two sets of four colored wire pairs (white, red, blue, green), a set of some plugs labelled "master bath" (for piping in Kenny G to your bubble bath I guess?), and then more wires labeled for the directions (such as the LF I'm holding in the pic).
This house is rather a lot for a simple farmboy. The house I grew up in was wired for electricity by my grandfather, with lamp wire.
Well, you can give 'em a whirl... but I wouldn't get your hopes up. In-ceiling are fine for background music, but I've never been a fan of 'em for use with a screen. Most sound okay at best, and then you have a voice coming from your ceiling, instead of from your screen. To try 'em out, you're going to need to buy a receiver or an integrated amp, at the least. If you don't care about surround effects, I'd just go with a more basic stereo receiver/integrated amp and just use the front left and right speakers. If you really want to do the full surround, nothing's stopping you, though - get at least a 5.1 surround receiver, in that case.
I would expect that the five sets of wires coming out of the wall are for surround, and the others are for the bath and another zone (kitchen? den?). You'll have to test them out. There's obviously four conductors coming out of each jacketed bundle. You can run a pair of speakers with each of these runs (+ and - for L & R), though the positive leads and the negative leads are sometimes doubled up so that each run is for a single speaker. The usual wiring is for a pair of speakers is: Red (+) and Black (-) for the Right channel and White (+) and Green (-) for the Left channel. If they're using each run for a single speaker, it's just the Red/White twisted together is your + and the Black/Green twisted together is your -. If there are no labels, you can test them out pretty easily with a battery - just hold one conductor to one battery terminal and tap the other wire to the other terminal - you'll hear a pop coming from the speaker and then you can label each appropriately.