My uncle just got a motor home and I installed a CD player today. The original stereo in it had 1 wire going to each of the 4 speakers and what looked like 2 common negatives. The new one had a positive and negative for each speaker. I hooked the positive to each of the 4 wires and left the negatives alone (not hooked up to anything) because the instructions for the new CD player said not to wire the speakers with a common negative. I fired up the stereo and it worked. Sounded like it wasn't as loud as it should be, but I thought that may have been because I was listening to only 2 speakers (crappy speakers at that). Two were up in the front where I was and the other two were all the way in the back of the motor home. The balance and fade didn't seem to have much effect on any of them.
Anyway, for the time being, will this setup work without causing any damage? What do I need to do to wire this the right way? Hopefully soon he's going to let me get some decent speakers for it and hook them up. If I did that, will I need to run anoter wire for each speaker to the front of the motor home? That's not a problem for the fronts, but it's a LOOOOOOOOONG way to the back of that thing. The most important thing here: I'm not going to send his new motor home up in flames or anything am I?

 

the best idea is to run new speakerwires to all the speakers

Ryan.

 

Yeah....you’re risking blowing out the head unit with the way you have it hooked up right now. The resistance (ohm load) is infinitely through the roof.

Chris