Category: Geeks r Us
Hey all.
I kno that there are some very good audio people on here and whilst I think this would work, I was wondering if I could run my situation past one of you in order to try and get a more well informed opinion.
I have 2 speakers from are old stereo; from what I can remember they sound good enough and I'm not one to waste anything if it still works which as far as I kno they still do (Its been around 8 years).
I want to connect them up to a pc and use them to play music for me to drum to, but there aren't any jacks on the ends of the cables - its just bare cable.
I kno that the usual root would be to just solder some jacks on, but I've not really perfected my soldering yet (Far from it) and I don't really want to mess them up. I've been researching scotch locks, which let you extend cables by stripping 2 cables and crimping each of them into one of the ends of the locks; my understanding is that the lock bridges the connection so to speak.
What I want to do is cut a 3.5 audio cable so that I have a jack on one end and bare cable on the other and use a scotch lock to connect it to the speaker cable, in other words:
speaker > cable with bare wire > scotch lock > bare wire of audio cable > 3.5 jack.
I have 2 questions, any input as always would be great:
1: Will this work? Are scotch locks good enough to carry enough power to produce good qualitty sound?
2: The speakers wern't powered externally when they were connected to our stereo, am I to take this to mean that an onboard card would have enough power to power them? If not, is pci any better?
Like I say, I see no reason why this wouldn't work, but I'm interested in thoughts from audio people since I'm more of a computer guy.
Chears.
While in theory this would work, in practice it wouldn't. You would still need some sort of amplifier to provide power to the speakers, since they're not powered. What I would do, is to find an old stereo amplifier, hook the speakers up as normal, then hook your computer up to the amp via a 3.5 to dual RCA. This will work for your situation.
If the speakers were powered, however, the other would work, except that each speaker would need a positive and a negative to the 3.5, the left speaker going to the tip, the right going to to the ring, the negatives going to the sleeve.