New Polk user with speaker/sub questions

turns31

I recently purchased my first home theater that includes a Pioneer 5.1 receiver, 2 polk 60 towers, 1 polk cs1 center, 1 polk 10in sub, and 2 polk t15 bookshelves. Right now I have all the speakers wired up directly to the receiver and the sub is connected with the rca cable. It really sounds great and I have no complaints. I do know that you are able to wire up speakers to the sub to use it's built in amp but I'm not sure what that'd do or why you would want to do it.

Also the 60s have two sets of terminals on the back so I put two separate speaker wires and spliced them together once at the receiver. Not sure if that's what you're supposed to do but it seems to sound great.

rooftop59

Welcome to CP!

Sounds like a sweet little starter set-up. My first setup was the monitor series (all bookshelfs) and I loved it!

As for the sub, you have it set up correctly. You are using the amp right now to power the sub. The rca cable is just taking a passive signal (from the sub pre-out) to the sub amp which is amplifying it and sending it on to the subwoofer speaker itself. What you can do is use the speaker cables for the main speaker, run them from the receiver to the sub speaker line level inputs, and then run another set of cables to the 60s. You would then set the 60s to large and use the subs built in crossover. but there is no need to do this, and you probably wouldn't hear much difference, it would just be harder to integrate.

As for the two speaker terminals on the 60s, what you are doing is fine as long as you removed to brass jumpers between the terminals. Otherwise you could fry your amp! The other option is to leave the jumpers on and just connect the cable to one of the sets of terminals which connects to the other set with the jumpers. But what you have done is just increased the gauge of the speaker wire, which is always a good thing. So I would make sure the brass jumpers are removed and leave everything else as is.

good luck and have fun!