My DVD player died, don't cry, it was a very bad DVD player, it wouldn't play hardly anything and what it did play it tended to mess up, but what it did do and the reason I bought it, was it's a surround sound unit, also, not that stellar in general but that part worked and I miss it, particularly I miss listening to the radio on the surround sound speakers, the receiver part is dead, but I assume the speakers are still good (except possibly the one that made the sound of someone beating on my door with a hammer... that one might be blown...).
On to the good stuff, I'm probably just going to toss everything, since apparently surround sound sold as units is very unreliable in terms of if you can trust the speakers to be rated properly and work with another system, so what would it take to convert it to extra speakers for an amp, I'd love it if it was something as simple as say... taking a standard guitar cable, and basically attaching all the inputs for my speakers to one part of the cable and all the (ground?) wires to the other part of the cable. I assume with my lack of knowledge, that would probably fail as the speakers need power and they won't get it... but does anyone know what/if it would take to make this happen, possibly even a tutorial type site explaining what to go buy at my local radio shack to make it happen? Before it blew I could play sound files off my computer through it and that sounded pretty nice, but I assume without the balance controls of the receiver and probably some other fancy equalization going on it wouldn't be the same (all signal would probably go to all speakers equally and might sound 'wrong'). Either way, these speakers would probably be in the dumpster by now if I didn't have to unscrew them from the walls and it would be cool to have it working as an extra speaker for my amp.
I will say I don't want to risk damaging one of my amps so splicing the wires into the speaker in my amp is further than I'm willing to go.
If I understand what you're asking you want to take an old speaker from a stereo system, and hook it up to your guitar amp?
As long it's a normal (no built-in amplifier) speaker, and your guitar amp isn't delivering more power than the speaker can handle, it should work.
It may not sound great, but that depends on the design of the speaker.
Is there any sort of markings on the back of the speaker that tell you what it's impedence (the word Ohms, or an 
) is?
Any indication of the wattage of the speaker?
What sort of wiring goes to the speaker? Just a pair of wires from the amp, or something else?
I wrapped a newspaper ’round my head
So I looked like I was deep
The subwoofer is 3 ohms and 100 watts, the center speaker is 4 ohms and 80 watts, the whole system is supposed to be 500 watts so it works out that the center and the front and sides would all have 80 watts. As a side note my bass amp was making some noises like it had a blown speaker but only for certain notes... so I had to take it apart and turned out some of the screws had gotten loose, it has an 8 ohm speaker in it.
There should be no major problem using *one* of those speakers instead of the regular speaker on your guitar amp. Most amps I've used can handle a 4 OHM speaker (I would imagine 3 is close enough), but if you start putting them in parallel with each other you may have trouble.
When you put 2 (or more) speakers in parallel with each other the total impedance is reduced, and your amp may not be able to safely deal with that if it gets too low. (2- 8 ohm speakers in parallel provides a total of 4 ohms load to the amp, 2- 4 ohm speakers equals 2 ohms)
I wrapped a newspaper ’round my head
So I looked like I was deep
Would that be the same if they were in a series, wouldn't the ohms go the other way (I'm not sure why the ohms would be reduced in paralel.... and I'm sure it's something to do with that I over R * E stuff that I only vaguely knew 13 years ago and never used). One speaker at a time *could* work sure, but that'd fall short of my goal of having all six of them wired up. I figure the real down side is without having a spare amp to risk on something like this it'd be far too complex to get off the ground for someone with next to no understanding of electricity. Maybe I can score a beater of an amp at a garage sale or pawn shop some time (or maybe a junker from the guitar shop though I imagine it's just too easy to replace a blown speaker and cheap for that to be reality).
One speaker at a time *could* work sure, but that'd fall short of my goal of having all six of them wired up.
Ahhh. :idea:
I didn't understand that from your first post.
With the correct combination of series/parallel, you could surround yourself with speakers, and not blow up anything, but I'd bet that it'll sound pretty strange.
My guess is that the whole thing would sound very trebley. One of the mid-high range boxes and the sub might sound fairly normal, but all 6... :?
Home stereo speakers are made to (more or less) equally pass all frequencies that a normal person can hear.
The typical guitar amp speaker is more of a low-to-mid frequency kind of thing.
I wrapped a newspaper ’round my head
So I looked like I was deep
Yeah, while I was looking for information on how to build an amp, I didn't really find the information I was looking for but I did find information about how they work to the point that generally amps boost the lows and highs... and how the natural sound of your pickups is about the same as if you set your amp to low = 0 mid = 5 and high = 0.
I think there was a flaw in the thinking, the speakers would be fine in terms of what the final sound was, I'm assuming that the pre-amp and all the equalization that guitars need would be handled before the sound ever got there, just like in a regular amp. Not that it changes the chances of me doing this much, just that it's one technical hurdle that really doesn't matter.
Series/parralel info Adding this in, it's basically information on how the resistance is calculated, haven't quite finished it but I think I could set it up even with the odd ball subwoofer being 3ohm 100 watts... what it doesn't seem to cover is the possibility of putting everything in paralel and then placing a resister before the whole mess to balance it out.
One last edit here... according to that site it seems like this should work basically...
FR and FL paralel = FF 2 ohms 160 watts?
SR and SL paralel = SS 2 ohms 160 watts?
FF and SS in Series = FFSS 4 ohms 320 watts?
SW and FC paralel = SWC (3*4)/(7) = 1.7 ohms with about the right watts per speaker (ratio of ohms to watts seems favorable for paralel).
FFSS in series with SWC should be 5.7 ohms, I don't understand the formula for power enough here. I think because the SWC has less ohms overall it would get less than half the power that the rest of the speakers receive...
The part I'm not sure about is the last bit, putting the subwoofer (SW) and Front Center (FC) group into series they would be underpowered, I think I would need to add a resister in parallel with the SW and FC speakers... to even it out to 4 ohms, something like 3.5 ohms resister based on the probably wrong theory that having 3 in parallel the formula would be (3*4*3.5)/(3+4+3.5). My guitar is in shop, I'm hoping to weasel the tech a bit about this as he seems very competant with electronics in guitars and amps, maybe sucker him into helping make this frankenstein amp a possibility... FOR SCIENCE!!!
