Subwoofer connection question

I hope this is clear. The sub has only one set of left and right connections. The amp of course has two for each speaker. Does it matter which speaker connection (the left or the right) that I hook up to from the subwoofer?

I meant to say the amp has two sets of left and right connections, one for the left channel and one for the right channel.

I believe the RCA connections may be meant to be connected to the amp's preamp outputs, not its speaker outputs. You might want to consult with the owner's manual, if you have access to one.

Many subwoofers deliberately favor one channel over the other. I mean, one channel will be arbitrarily suppressed (volume reduced) before the left and right signals are combined for playback. They do this because the low frequencies may be out of phase in the original left and right signals, and combining them directly would result in unwanted signal cancellation. Suppressing one of the channels would reduce this. The justification would be that low notes are fairly omnidirectional anyhow, so you would hear the same from either channel, and the suppression just makes sure there is no cancellation. Even with this, it shouldn't make a real difference if the channels are reversed.

Go to Radio Shack (or WalMart, etc.) and buy an RCA "Y" adapter. This will have 2 RCA male connectors on one end and 1 RCA male connector on the other end - should cost about $3.00. I'll leave it to you to figure out how it should be connected from the amp to the subwoofer...

-RW-

Your post is still confusing - you don't/can't make RCA connections to or from speaker binding posts. Are you trying to hook up the sub via RCA cables or via speaker cables between the speaker binding posts on your amp and speaker binding posts on your sub?

You want to hook the sub RCA inputs to the Preamp output if your pre has an extra one. If the sub has inputs that look like speaker terminals then you can hook your amp speaker output to the sub.
What model is the sub? That may help if someone here has the same sub.

I have a Totem Dreamcatcher sub and I have found out that I do have an extra output on my passive TVC preamp. So I guess the easy answer is to run a speaker cable from my sub inputs to the extra pre-amp output and I should be all good.

Now I am just curious: if my pre did not have an extra set of outputs what would I have done...just run the sub cable from the sub inputs to either the left or right channel speaker outputs?

Dude - your preamp outs are line level RCA connections - you can't run speaker cable from them. You run interconnect cables with RCA connectors from the preamp to the sub - one right, one left.

Alternatively, if your sub has speaker connections (aka binding posts) as well, you could run a second set of speaker cables from your amp's binding posts to those on the sub.

Don't use both methods at the same time by the way.

If your preamp did not have the extra set of outputs you could use the speaker cable connections outlined above (assuming your sub has spaeker connectors or create a virtual second set of preamp outs via the Y-cables that Rlwainwright mentioned.

The jury is still out on what connection method is best.

Is there a chance of running into problems if he is using a long interconnect from the "passive preamp"? I know most subs are anywhere from 3 meters(or even more) from the rack. Will the cable lengths make a difference with a passive instead of active preamp?