Amp wiring question - polarity and grounding

[Millerrh]

If you are splicing into the factory wiring to add an amplifier, are the negative lines supposed to be tied together and/or grounded or are they supposed to be floating and differential? I wouldn't expect they are tied together, thinking it was a differential signal, but I just bought a LOC and the shells of the RCAs are connected to one another. Seems like they should not be, but I am not an expert on stereo wiring.

I recently hooked up an amp using high level outputs where I spliced an RCA cable into my speaker wire and am not happy with the sound quality. I also suspect doing so has the amp wired out of phase with the rest of the system - I swapped +/- on my sub input and it sounds a lot better.

So I bought a LOC to see if that might help things and noticed that they treat the negative speaker wire differently by tying them together at the RCA shell compared to wiring RCAs directly to the speaker wire which keeps the negative lines separate. I'm curious how that impacts things.

 

[CrashBang]

The amplifier power negative terminal would be grounded to chassis, and the speakers negative wires will not all tie together. The speaker negative terminals need to be connected to each source negative terminal.


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[Millerrh]

The amplifier power negative terminal would be grounded to chassis, and the speakers negative wires will not all tie together. The speaker negative terminals need to be connected to each source negative terminal.


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So why would the line output converter I bought have the shells of the RCA cables tied together?

 

[CrashBang]

So why would the line output converter I bought have the shells of the RCA cables tied together?

Unless they are passively spitting to multiply speakers on the output, IDK.

IMO, they should not be tied together. What is the make/ model?



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