Ugh.

The semi-wealthy older men of the area I live in have fully bought into Bose (even my father in law). I've gone into several homes to help them with their home theaters, and had to work with these damn "acoustimass" (I really hate that word) systems. Most of the time, I just sigh and live with it, but this time I'm trying to help out someone with a setup that's weird even for Bose.

Up front, he has three sets of those double-cube things on the wall for L/C/R. Those are all wired into an "acoustimass" (ugh) on the floor, and the wires all go back to a standard receiver. I was surprised to see that they didn't go back from that point to one of their proprietary "lifestyle" units, but that's how it was set up.

The trouble seems to start when there are other wires going into the wall and disappearing, and reappearing (I believe) at a plate in the back of the room, emerging, and going into a second "acoustimass" (*shudder*), going back out into the wall again, presumably to connect to the two speakers mounted on the back wall acting as the satellites.

*Phew!* That was far more than I've ever wanted to talk about a stupid Bose setup.

The problem is that I can't get anything out of these rear speakers, so I'm not sure what to do now. Ideally, I'd remove these "acoustimass" (I give up) units and wire the speakers directly to the receiver (along with a traditional sub), but I've been reading up and it sounds like Bose makes these speakers to be 4 and sometimes 2 ohms, which I assume would not be good for your standard Sony receiver like this guy has.

What do I do? Push as hard as I can to get this guy to replace every part of this stupid Bose system, instead installing normal effing speakers? Can I work with the speakers I have? Has anyone heard of a Bose configuration like this? Is it basically just fudging a 5.1 system by cobbling together a 3.1 and a 2.1 system?

"acoustimass"


ps- In true Bose fashion, it seems like every bit of wire running through this guy's setup is the thinnest gauge you could think of. Looks like ethernet stranded pairs back there...

*edit*

I forgot one of the things I was going to ask. I have this basic toner and probe kit. In the past, I've been able to use the red and black leads to send a tone to a speaker (useful for quickly figuring out which of the wires in the box is left, right, or center). But I wasn't able to get a tone to generate on these Bose speakers. Is that because of the impedance? Something else?