Basic Setup & Tutorials

Let’s say you’ve been following along with our blogs or videos, and you’ve decided to take your single REL (or stereo pair) and expand it into a REL 3D system to greatly enhance your theatre experience. First, you add the center channel REL connected High-Level then add the rear sub. This is where the wiring can become a little tricky. Things like sliding glass doors on the wall you wanted it to be placed next to can throw up roadblocks. AirShip II to the rescue! Let’s back up one quick step -adding the center channel REL seems straightforward; just figure out how long your cable needs to be to allow for easy placement (somewhere in the middle half of the front wall). Connect the REL High-Level cable to the rear of your center channel speaker, and make sure you’re set to as wide open as the AVR will allow (usually no lower than 40 Hz is possible, with the subwoofer output set way up at 200 Hz) and then dial it all in. Right? But wait…getting a signal fed to the rear channel REL, especially High-Level can be a challenge. And, if you want to hear the most performance possible, you’ll still need to run both a High-Level cable AND an LFE cable. So, what can you do that doesn’t involve the words “spiders” and “crawlspaces” in the same sentence? Role of the Rear Channel Sub: First, a quick refresher: the role of the rear channel sub, especially when using High-Level input, is to restore the scale and sense of spaciousness built into the original theatre release of a movie (or game). While the role of the front third of the theatre is fairly intuitive, the roles of the surround channel and rear sub(s) are less so. These are necessary to carry the rear 2/3 of your theatre’s 3-dimensional space (can be a nice living room, all the way up to a semi-pro purpose-built dedicated screening room) that’s responsible for placing you inside the scene. So, yes - these elements are important…very important. The Solution: This is where adding a simple, reasonably priced component like our Airship II, which permits ultra-fast, wide bandwidth, wireless connectivity can produce a minor miracle. Now you have the ability to send Full-Range sound wirelessly; that is, sending both the LFE and High-Level signals at the same time through a dedicated channel that supplies your rear channel REL sub (or subs). This opens up the ability to truly bring your theatre to life. Suddenly, it’s possible to ship both the huge special effects bass that the biggest scenes demand, and still have the almost constant rich fill of normal bass. Bass that does everything from rendering the human voice naturally, to supplying subtler effects like the tank treads in a war movie that can otherwise sound thin, and even annoying. Airship II brings theatre alive in ways that REL has made famous in high-end theatre circles. Not just for the extreme output of .1 exuberance, but in ways that humanize sound and make movies more thoroughly enjoyable for the duration of the film. RelTip: It’s important to examine the quality of your Wi-Fi setup. Wireless audio is quite different than normal computer usage; you’ll be streaming in real-time with no audio buffering or error correction. Because of this very high, constant data usage in music or theatre applications, it’s necessary to be working from a fast, contemporary Wi-Fi system. Many serious theatre hobbyists invest a few hundred dollars in a dedicated WiFi Wi-Fsystem just for their theatres. So, Let’s review: Both the rear sub-bass and the surround channels in a well-outfitted theatre, are responsible for delivering scale to the placement of yourself (the viewer) within a 3-dimensional aural reality for the duration of the film. Since running. Using a REL Airship II to deliver an extremely fast, high quality, wireless signal capable of delivering both High-Level signals (the bass components of one’s surround speakers) as well as LFE/.1 is a highly cost-effective solution. One that enables both the use of these crucial channels and the deep bass that allows you to be transported into the film. Thank you for reading our latest blog. We strive to provide content that's both entertaining and educational. If you have questions or suggestions for future articles, reach out to us at contactus@rel.net. We value your input and will do our best to respond within a few days. With over 160 years of combined experience, we're committed to making your audio experience exceptional. If you found value in this piece, please share it with friends who might benefit.

<> The below text is a transcription of the video. Hi, John Hunter here. Listen. On our traditional RELs that use a high level connection, which is supplied by this cable that we include with every one of our high level empowered subs. It's pretty simple. We're going to make it simpler. So in the past, what we've suggested, nice click. That's now connected up and this end goes to your power amplifier, right? Everybody who's been doing this for years, knows and goes, yeah, okay, big deal. So we have two hots. Hot colors are hot, red is hot, yellow is hot. Red traditionally is used for right channel. Ground red is right and yellow goes to left channel, not ground. Excuse me. Hot, hot, hot. So what do we do with the all-important ground and why is ground important? Ground is important because if we don't complete the circuit, it can hum with certain kinds of amplifiers like class D amplifiers or balanced differential amplifiers. We float this, but I've got a better way to do this for everybody. Follow along. This is really simple. I'm not going to pull this off, but we come sort of pre-stripped a little bit here. We can pull it off. But instead of trying to connect this to the black terminal on the output of your amplifier, so you know the red and black terminals, instead of going to that ever do this. Strip this back a little bit. Find a chassis, ground or bolt anywhere on the back panel. If you see a random screw, just pull this back a little bit, tap it to it. If your hum goes like that, you found ground. Always go to chassis ground. And it gets away from all of the complexities of connecting high level, every one of them. But I have a class TM, great. Go to chassis ground, who works great. What about balance differential and balance differential amp, there are actually two hots and no ground? Go to chassis ground. It works brilliantly every time. So it just eliminates all the complexity of connecting up one of our high levels to your power amplifier. And if you just look for the screws on the back, the best example of all are the Marantz receivers. They use these beautiful copper, some kind of a copper alloy on their screw head. So when you look back there, you see copper, copper, copper, copper all the way around the perimeter of the rear panel. Every one of those is a grounding point. So just find which way everyone is closest to the channel that you're connecting up to. Take it right to that, tap it. You'll hear hum goes away instantly. Unscrew that. Wrap this around a bit, tighten it back down. Clip off the rest, you're done. Whole thing takes 30 seconds. That's the smartest way to actually obtain ground on a real high level circuit.

<> The below text is a transcription of the video. So, for someone new to REL, taking a look at the back panel can be a little bit daunting. Let's admit it. You look back there. There's a million inputs controls. Gold plated connectors Speak On connectors for the high level. What is all this stuff for? And why do we have it? I'm gonna do one quick thing to make this easier for you to understand because the Serie S and our reference products have inputs and outputs. So right off the bat, simplify it. When you look at it, don't get sort of awe struck by the ins and the outs. This is effectively what you're dealing with. Right? You have a high level Speak On connection input. We'll come back to that in just a moment. You have an XLR 0.1 input, and you have both stereo inputs. So there's an extra one down here, but I'm doing it for simplicities sake, stereo, low level input and an RCA 0.1. That's really all there is to it. Now, why do we have these, let's walk through this. Our preferred method for connecting up for both music and theater doesn't exclude the use of 0.1, but our preferred mechanism for connecting up to your system is to connect to the speaker terminals on your main power amplifier. Why? We're not using a single watt of power over here. We have a, in this case, an enormous 800 watt amplifier. Very few of you are using more than a hundred Watts at home. So, what's going on here. We want to be able to bring forward the sonic signature. Not only that amplifier, whatever the processor is, the interconnect cables, the way that that particular source, whether it's Blu-ray or very high end digital front end, if it's two channel, all of those feed forward into our REL, so that exactly what's being fed to your speakers is what we're feeding to the REL. It's the only way we can ensure that we exactly track the micro dynamics, the macrodynamic right the big stuff, the really delicate little stuff. That's all the delicate harmonics dying away all of that needs to be built forward. We don't have the prior of capturing exactly the way that the rest of your system sounds. There are times when you can't. Some people make some very, very nice high quality powered, active, loudspeaker. That have their own amplifier in many cases, in most cases they're wireless. Right? And so, we can't come off of that speaker's amplifier, it's built in, it's intrinsic. There are no outputs on it. Why would there be it's built into the speaker. So that's why we include the stereo low level inputs. And then for 0.1, that's a pure theater function. LFE stands for low frequency effects. They're really the biggest most bombastic special effects in a movie. There are two ways traditionally of bringing them in this would come in from your receiver or your AV processor. You're either coming in through XLR, which is a pro style connector and I wanna be clear, there's not an intrinsic qualitative difference between RCA and XLR. Almost everybody assumes that XLR connectors and the signal of being fed is somehow mysteriously better. It's a balanced version of the RCA and in some cases, depending on how good and how committed the engineering team was of that receiver. It may in fact be better, particularly at noise rejection. So, if you're having to run cables a very and I mean more than 40 feet, 60 feet and longer XLR makes a lot of sense, just from a pure functionality standpoint, it's quieter, it's got a positive form, positive and a negative phase positive going back. And so, you've got this very robust signal. For most of us in a normal home, you're talking maybe 30 feet maximum, typically between your processor and your subwoofer. Is it really, really critical? No, but it's nice to have it as options. So, we give you both, right and that's really it as far as the input connectivity goes, and I'll take this off. We then, because these are designed to be stackable into line arrays, a total of three. We give you inputs here. Outputs here ditto, input here, output here and right on down the line. So that's the duplication. It's not there to be needlessly obsessive, or to be confusing to you. We just need twice as many connectors to offer that facility of being able to jump up to the middle sub from a line array and from the middle to the highest. Hope that answers your questions. It's why we do what we do, and it really is grounded in knowing what produces the best results in every combination possible.

The below text is a transcription of the video. When you get your new REL sub  home, if it's not an HT model, if it's a TX and S a reference, you're going to see that it has this beautiful cable with a speakon on one end. This plugs in we'll come back to the speakon in a minute, and then you'll see three wires. Now, basic coding of life is that hot colors are hot. That would be the red and the yellow and black is ground. Right. We deliver them exactly like this. I just took the bag off this two minutes ago. And you can see that we've actually pre-stripped this. Now this is not connected to an RCA. Just want to make very, very clear. This is a high level connection. All right. High level, meaning it's coming off the binding posts on the back of your power amplifier. The purpose of this whole thing is to give the REL the same input signal, meaning the entire chain of custody, right? Sources, cables all the way through preempt amp, all of that. That's what we need to feed through to the REL. So that it's dynamic and tonal signature is exactly what your speakers are being sent. We don't supply them with connectors. Why? Well, because five-way binding post vary so much. Some of them work brilliantly with bananas.  Other ones work really well with spades. We don't know what you've got. We don't know how much space you have, but what we do know is if we supply it with 22 gauge, really high quality copper, pre stripped. Now we start the stripping and I'm going to show you. There's a real pro tip here, everybody that gets these the first time he asked him off. Now you got two inches of copper that wants to fray and split and short,  be very careful. You do not want to have dead shorts happening. I'm going to show you and we may have to cut away here. Oh, this one's nice and smooth. You want to pull this back? About half the distance. So you can see this red piece is about two inches, about 50 millimeters long. We don't want to just pull that off. Want to leave that on. Why? Because what we're going to do is actually pull this over the connector and leave this on so that it remains an insulator. We're going to do this right now. I've just bent this into a little horseshoe, right? And I'm going to slip this over this connector right here. Just like this. We do this in the field all the time. Right, and then we snug this down really nice and tight. There we go. Now we have a perfect really tight connection here and it can't short to anything. So if I then go for example and put on, do the same exact thing with the yellow and connect this up to this hot connector over here and repeat the process, these can't short. This is just an insulator, works brilliantly. The other pro tip then is if your speaker cables are connected, for example spade, you would probably want to go with a banana for these. It's really important to understand you want to have a really good, solid, tight connection for your main speakers. If you're using spade, we recommend that when you go to connect the RELs up, you use a banana because that doesn't interfere with your primary connection. Conversely, this would be what I would do if the customer were using banana connectors for their speakers. That make sense? So go with this connection. When you've got  bananas that are your primary speaker to amplifier  connection and go with the inverse, go with bananas on this anytime that you're dealing with somebody who's already got spades that are mounted hard, really nicely clamped down tightly at the amplifier for example.

The below text is a transcript of the video. Hey there, we're here to actually just do some really basic explanations. A lot of times when people get involved in audio, there's just so much new information they've got to try and sort out. We've been doing this for a very long time and we just thought it would be useful for you guys to learn a little bit about binding posts, which are these connectors that are used to connect it both on amplifiers and speakers cable between those two. These are traditionally called, this is the most basic kind of all, this is called a five-way binding post. Covers a variety of different ways to connect it. Probably my least favorite is a bare wire. And the reason I say that is if you're not careful with it, and especially at the beginning, you're not going to feel as comfortable with all the nuances of connection. It's really possible because these, these holes that go through you can't see the yet, but there's actually a whole drilled through the screw mechanism here and it's oriented to point right at the other connector. And if you have a wire that's a little too long, or you have just a few strands that are sticking out you can do what's called a dead short, and it's called that because hot and ground will touch together. When you do that, you can damage your amplifier. So unless you absolutely have to, some types of receivers, for example, have a sort of pin loaded or spring-loaded, hole that just opens up and that you kind of have to use a bare wire. But besides for that, I probably would stay away from it. All right, here we go. I'm going to show you that one of the most common ways to connect. This is called a spade lug. Now we actually deliberately used ones that were relatively short. If you go online and really start looking at different high quality spade lugs, it's called a spade lug because it sort of looks like the shape of a spade. There are thousands, literally thousands of these and many of them have much bigger, more impressive looking metal. You're thinking, what am I looking for here? Why? You don't need to have massive amounts of metal for it to be a good spade lug. And in fact, what we're finding is oftentimes things that have a really long tang here can have the same problem that the bare wire has. Right? So if I were to put this in and, and, oftentimes that really is the most natural way to do it. These are very close together. We would wind up with the same resulting problem. If I have long tangs here and long fingers here. They go together and they would dead short. So not a bad idea to have them actually match up to the kind of connect we have. There are other ones, it's fine. It, for example, if this wasn't even here. Right, and we were just dealing with right and left and you really wanted as much metal to metal contact, as possible. Great. I'll show you how easy it is. These just slip right over the threaded barrel and we tighten it down. When it gets there, really, and this is where amateurs don't understand. Once it starts to feel tight, it's only starting to, and as you can see, I've just made about four turns after it began to get tight. You really want to bear down with your fingers and get it really nice and snug. Otherwise, the first time you move the speaker or the amplifier it'll, tend to fall out. And you don't want that cause you again, can wind up with a dead short. So here we go. I'm just doing the flat ground one now and off we go works well again, I'm already into resistance and I'm having to really fight through this to snug it down tightly. And there you go. That's the spade. Now there's a second kind. Now I'm really just dealing with the two most common ones. It's called a five-way because it can handle a bare wire, it can handle a banana, which we'll get to in a moment, spade lug, dual banana, and a pin which is sort of a surrogate for bare wire. It's a whole connector that just results in a tiny little gold pin. I don't recommend anything really, but these two, the banana and the spade are the most common out there. And they're common because they make good, solid mechanical connections and mechanical electrical connections, so you can really trust what you're getting into. The banana so-called because somebody thought it was shaped like a banana. These literally just press in. I love these. These are off of parts express. That costs almost nothing, and what I love about these is they've got a very cool little feature here where the wire goes into the back of the barrel here, and you've got a little set screw and it just makes it so easy to attach sort of a normal, a 14 gauge 16 gauge wire to this. You know, if you're not spending thousands and thousands of dollars on state of the art cables, these are fantastic. Just undo this little set screw. It's hard to make out here. We'll show you in more detail in a second. We just backed that thing out. Slide the wire in, tighten it down and then slide the, and these are done both for, for sort of looks right for color coding hot is red ground is black, but also to prevent them from shorting. All right. So there's a lot of process to this and these just plug in the back of this connector so that's, the easy as could be. Just a quick warning, a lot of things coming out of European markets are required to have a little filler plug. It's a really hard plastic piece. You're going to have to dig that thing out with something like a jeweler's screwdriver. They're highly resistant, but they will come out. You just have to keep your fingers away and make sure you don't hurt yourself with that with a sharp implement. But these are the two most common ways. There is a kind of a Sonic difference and you'll find a lot of Americans really prefer the spade. That's because it gives the most amount of surface area of contact, and that results in sort of a, a richer bass heavy sound, right. Current flows through surface area. So it's kind of interesting over in Europe, you'll get a lot more people using bananas and I remember many years ago listening really critically when I was working with a cable manufacturer to dozens and dozens and dozens, probably hundreds of connectors by the end of my career. And there is a kind of a Sonic difference. Bananas tend to be fresher lighter, crisper, spades tend to be heavier a little richer, a little denser. So, a little bit of audio stylism there.