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How to get a mono signal for whole house audio

I'm helping my sister plan for whole house audio in the house she's building. I asked the electrician to run 14/4 from the audio equipment to each volume control, then individual runs of 14/2 out to each speaker location. Yesterday I checked his work. He ran a single 14/2 cable from the equipment to the volume control, then a single 14/2 out to a speaker location, then out from there to the next speaker location in series. He wired for MONO instead of stereo! Drywallers are in there today sealing up the house. Bummer! How can I come up with a mono signal to feed this system. A local Guitar Center said I should use a Y connecting cable to combine the left and right preamp outs of the receiver to get mono. Will this work? Any ideas?
rogereckert

Showing 1 response by zowie

zowie
68 posts
 
It's a bad idea to run stereo recordings in mono because you often will lose music. I'm not talking about soundstage type of stuff.

When you sum stereo recordings to mono there are often phase cancellations, depending upon the care the engineer took in the mixing, so you lose program. (A good engineer may listen in mono to check for phasing issues, but even when detected they are not always easily fixed since they are sometimes the result of improvident mic placement).

You also lose perception of certain elements of a mix. It is common to have a track that is in the same frequency range as another but lower in "volume" and the engineer will therefore separate the tracks spatially so the listener does not lose perception of the quieter track.

Those of you with a mono switch to play with will notice that mono blend sometimes just contracts the sound stage to the center, and other times the music become muddier and you can't hear all the parts you heard in stereo without straining to pick them out.

That's why you read about a recording having a stereo mix and a mono mix. You can't (or at least shouldn't) just sum the stereo mix.
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