Leaderboard

Explanation and rambling below. tl;dr, speaker outputs are high voltage, amp casing is ground. Treat it accordingly. If everything still works, I doubt there's any long standing damage to either device. A bit of heat shrink isn't a bad idea, or even a fully insulated connector. Will tag @TonyD'Amore so he can see this. Full bridge, half bridge, class D, AB, etc are all the same in this regard The rails on the amp are energized, and the amp casing is, electrically, a ground. Full bridge / half bridge within this context only refers to if the voltage modulation (signal) happens on one terminal, or both. But regardless, they're both energized. They need to be. Having one terminal at "0v" and the other terminal at any other voltage would just be like wiring a battery to your speaker - DC offset. negative/positive doesn't really exist here as we normally think about negative and positive.... It's just to keep phase consistent, so just bear that in mind when I talk about this. Imagine both pos and neg are charged to 40v. How do you move the driver forward? Positive needs to increase to >40v, so that the ΔV is positive. So, if you play a signal that has an amplitude of 20v, your positive would need to be 60v, and your negative would remain 40v. ΔV = 60v-40v=20v. Then on the other half of the sine wave, where the driver needs to move backwards, positive would be reduced to 20v, so ΔV = 20v-40v=-20v. Whether this is done through one of the output terminals, or both, doesn't matter for the sake of this context. The point I'm trying to make is that regardless of the amplifier design, your speaker terminals should be treated as an energized, high voltage source. Hell, the large 12kw+ amplifiers put out more voltage than you'd get at a wall socket. They become a genuine electrical hazard if you start reaching around and fiddling with stuff wile the system is on.