Adding book shelf speakers to computer

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NotVery[H]

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 15, 2004
Messages
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I found some nice book shelf speakers (EPI, made my Harm Kardon or whatever...early 70's models) free at my new house. I was wondering, what is needed to hook them up to the computer? I'm currently pimping an old old 2.1 Altec Lansing setup, and wouldn't mind these...they have really nice tweeters and good mids...they are setup with just regular wire imputs
 
What's your sound card?

I'm pretty sure you want to invest in a good receiver.

When you get that, you can either use the Digital Out on your sound card, and connect it straight to your receiver, or just use the headphone/speaker/line-out jack and buy a mini-to-RCA cable to connect it.

You then connect the bookshelves to the receiver, and turn the volume on your computer up to max.

That's it.
 
get a reciever, any stereo one will do, but preferacbly a good unit with 20-20khz response. Some cheaper recievers only sport 40-20k response (the bottom 20 is filtered out at the preamp level, cheap way to get the amp to play louder). You can get a nice used reciever for $50-100. Or just drop a bit over $200 for a Yamaha RX-496 and call it done. I love my 496, cleanest sound I have ever heard from a sub-$300 unit.
 
Best way to do it cheaply would be to buy an E-mu 0404, and use analog output to a cheap used stereo amp/receiver. Total cost is maybe $200 including all cables, and the soundcard's DACs will be better than that of any receiver in this price range.
 
mustang_steve said:
get a reciever, any stereo one will do, but preferacbly a good unit with 20-20khz response. Some cheaper recievers only sport 40-20k response (the bottom 20 is filtered out at the preamp level, cheap way to get the amp to play louder). You can get a nice used reciever for $50-100. Or just drop a bit over $200 for a Yamaha RX-496 and call it done. I love my 496, cleanest sound I have ever heard from a sub-$300 unit.
Click to expand...

You won't notice the missing sound under 40hz with bookshelf speakers anyways. Even top of the line stuff hardly goes below 40hz.
 
They do come very close though, if you place hte speakers in the right (or wrong) place, you could very well tap into the high 30s.

It all depends on the size your considering bookshelf. Anyhting that was designed to be placed on speaker stands is a "bookshelf" design, which includes some compact designs using 12" woofers.

Also a pair of 6-1/2" speakers if placed in the right cabinet with the right crossover can hit down to 45hz...an 8" could in theory go down below 40hz. Only reason it's so rare is the HT craze, which leads to people wanting speakers that could take huge watts instead of having a wide frequency response. The sacrifice of having a single driver put out very low bass for it's size is a huge hit in power handling.

The main reason for this is if they cut the frequency response to make their ratings higher, where else did thay cut corners? I know my old pioneer SX-205 actually had built in non-adjustable equalizations that made the thing sound like utter crap. So did my old Fisher.
 
I have an old Pioneer SA-550 and it sounds much better than most receivers out there, comming close to my friends Dennon. I also have a Technics SH-8055 to fill in the dropoff in the high range that my Audigy makes. These are hooked up to my JBL N24s and my PM 2.1 sub. Soon I should be getting some Klipsch Heresys and some larger sub, like a Paradigm or something. You also mention that your SX has "cut corners." I remeber that the SX series was a fairly top of the line amp at the time and was build with quality over wattage in mind. Infact, your's should only be like 30-40 watts per channel.
 
Nope SX-205 was $100MSRP as of 1998, 110wpc, build was cheap shiny plastic, and it had a "super-bass" switch on it. It was the very definition of a "dorm blaster". Actually the power switch has to be pushed in and pried out now for it to work...it's been doing that since 2000. All I use it for now is for backyard BBQs since if it gets stolen, I'm not going to cry over it.

Your thinking vingtage SX, towards the end of the SX name, they became utter garbage. I had a Jensen car camp that sounded better...and I only paid $40 for that.
 
no problemo, Pioneer's lines were confusing enough.

Once I went Yamaha, I haven't looked back. Good and cheap.

I only wish the stereo recievers had a sub-out.
 
mustang_steve said:
They do come very close though, if you place hte speakers in the right (or wrong) place, you could very well tap into the high 30s.

It all depends on the size your considering bookshelf. Anyhting that was designed to be placed on speaker stands is a "bookshelf" design, which includes some compact designs using 12" woofers.

Also a pair of 6-1/2" speakers if placed in the right cabinet with the right crossover can hit down to 45hz...an 8" could in theory go down below 40hz. Only reason it's so rare is the HT craze, which leads to people wanting speakers that could take huge watts instead of having a wide frequency response. The sacrifice of having a single driver put out very low bass for it's size is a huge hit in power handling.
Click to expand...

I think you missed the part where he said he had some 70's speakers
 
and...

I had a 1960s set od Sansui bookshelves that, with the right EQ, could hit very hard and decently deep, especially for an old iron loop magnet speaker. At one point I actually converted them into powered subs...and my god those things could hit.

You have to remeber most of those speakers had built-in EQ for the common soundsources of the times. The best thing that can be done with the lower end of that sutff, if it had good cabinets and drivers, is to take it to a speaker repair shop and have them re-design the corssover....about $200, but if the speaker was good before, it's going to be far better after.

The thing was, those Sansuis actually had pretty decent drivers in them already, with exception to the 4-digit models, which were more or less frat-blasters (awesome woofers and mids though, the tweeters were often utter gabage though and very hard to find a tweet that plays nice enough with the woofs and mids to even go through the trouble of making a crossover for), and the SF-2, which was a very bizaare speaker to say the least (decent woofers, bad tweeter, very very odd design).

Yeah I know we are talking H/K speakers, jsut using hte Sansui as a comparison point....same era.


Plus, why get any kind of reciever when you can get a good one, and upgrade the speakers later?
 
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