I need help from an audiophile

IronDuke

Ancient Mariner
Recently, a set of decent speakers came into my grubby little palms. I want to use them as speakers for my computer, as they have much better sound quality than those which I'm currently using.

The problem, though, is that my computer lacks the proper jacks to plug them in. If I could convert them to either RCA or TRS, I'd be home free. I just don't know what the heck these plugs are, and what to look for in a little converter unit - I don't even know what to search for on Google.

Any help, guys, would be most appreciated. A pic of the cables is below.
 

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Sorry, I have no idea.

The only thing I'd do myself is taking these speakers to some computerstore and ask them how to connect them to your PC.
 
Splice.

Those look like cable ends off of a 'system' unit.  Where the whole system, tuner, cd player, cassette deck-- they usually are system specific.  You may have the best luck in cutting the wires and splicing a headphone style plug onto them.  Not the best sound quality, but mite be the best you can do.  Unless, you wanna get nutso, and feed the rca output into a smaller receiver and plug the speakers into the receiver.  For that, you want to use the 'line out' instead of the headphone jack.
 
Try Radio Shack. (I'm assuming that chain has stores in Canada.) They usually have every type of adapter known to man at good prices. Even if they can't help you directly, they may have other ideas.
 
Four responses and four different opinions;

I wouldn't bother trying my luck with the right socket. I would just cut it off, and soldier the wires into headphone stlye stereo jack.
Wasted mentioned splicing, which is a good idea if those cables are short and you don't have enough of it to do some comfortable soldering. However, keep in mind that the cable you have there is an ordinary 016 copper wire, used for A/D signals where quality isn't needed. You aren't going to lose any quality because the quality is already lost.

I don't know your skills, but i would open the speaker casing, desolder those wires, bought 2x2 meters of ordinary speaker cable (025, red-black) for few bucks, and resolder one side of cables into speakers, headphone style (or RCA, depending what i needed) on the other.
 
SinisterMinisterX said:
Try Radio Shack. (I'm assuming that chain has stores in Canada.) They usually have every type of adapter known to man at good prices. Even if they can't help you directly, they may have other ideas.

We used to have Radio Shack up here; it was bought by Circuit City, though, and rebranded as "The Source" - it didn't go belly-up like the US version of Circuit City though.

I think I'll try my hand at opening up the speakers and re-soldering wires. The speakers were free, so if I screw it up, it's not a big loss!

Thanks folks!
 
Here's another one for you.As I've mentioned earlier, I'm as thick as fucking pigshit when it comes to computers and technology in general.

I have a mountain of vinyl I haven't played for years, and would love to do so again.Apart from buying a turntable, i'd love to convert them to cd's and put them onto my iTunes library. Can it be done?
 
Yeah, it can be done.  The only way I know of is a USB turntable.  I've seen a few, they can be included in your stereo system as a regular turntable, or with USB output, can be plugged into your computer and you can 'burn' the vinyl onto your HDD.  Of course, that is having to buy the turn table. 

Other than that, I'm not sure if there is some service where someone will do that for you-- however, the set-up I saw was only about $100 USD.
 
Kopfanatic said:
Apart from buying a turntable, i'd love to convert them to cd's and put them onto my iTunes library. Can it be done?
Yes, but only by getting hold of a turntable. As Wasted said, these USB turntables will do the trick as that is what they are specifically designed to do - but an ordinary turntable will do as you just output the sound direct into your soundcard via the line-in input (if the turntable has them, use the RCA output and plug that into your soundcard). You will also need a WAV editor to create and normalise the tracks - but by getting a USB turntable, this software will most likely come with it.

A word of warning though, you will need to have the recording volume on your soundcards line-in down low and adjust up accordingly - if you have it on full, it could blow your soundcard. And create the files on your HDD as WAV files not MP3's.
 
That works well, Albie?  I always knew that with a receiver, you had to have a Phono specific input, because of the grounding.  Not a problem the way you stated it?
 
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