Wiring speakers to a 1/4" socket - failed :( - Pickups, Wiring & Electronics.

I have very basic electronics knowledge, but I thought this should work ...

I found a pair of very old, powered speakers that came in plastic cases. The kind you plug into a PC, but with decent sized speakers. Good candidates I thought for putting in a (as yet undiscovered) box as a way of letting my wife also enjoy the output of my Honeytone eStudio ;)

Found a power supply with the right spec, plugged their input mini-jack plug into the laptop and they worked fine - except that there was obviously a problem with the lead near the jack plug as they crackled and died out if it was wiggled.

But that kinda suited me as my idea was to put a 1/4" jack socket in the box to get the sounds in.

So I stripped the speakers out of their boxes, along with the PCB containing the "amp", switches etc, chopped the mini jack and some cable off the end of the input cable, and traced it back to the PCB. One wire for left, one wire for right, and surrounding copper strands as a common ground.

I'm only putting mono in, so I stripped back the free end, twisted the 2 main wires together and twisted together the copper strands surrounding them both. So my theory at this point is I have one signal wire going to both left and right speakers, and one ground wire.

The jack socket I had available is one I bought with a piezo attached, so it already had two wires attached to it. I chopped off the piezo, stripped back the wires and twisted them together with my two speaker wires. Complication was its a 3-pole switched jack socket, but I found the PDF online for it (http://www.rapidonline.com/netalogue/specs/20-1397.pdf) and it confirmed that tab 1 was the "sleeve" so I attached my ground wire to that, and tab 3 was the tip, so I attached my signal wire to that.

Power up, plug in, stand back and ... nothing. And nothing ever worked from then on. I took the speaker connections off their builtin amp and connected them to the jack socket. Nothing. I separated the speakers and attached them singly to the jack socket. Nothing. I tried other combinations of connections on the jack socket. Nothing.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here?

Should I be able to do what I was trying to do?

Any obvious reasons why it doesn't work?

Should I have followed a different protocol?

Sorry for the very long story for a very small project/problem, but I frittered away most of yesterday afternoon on this, digging myself deeper and deeper. Maybe the detail will help identify where I went wrong.

Progress at last!

First, I found this http://www.docstoc.com/docs/24968937/Speaker-Wiring-Diagrams that confirms what Slim said.

Second, I discovered that if I took the output from the headphone socket rather than line out on the eStudio, there is sound at the speakers.

So, even when I was making the right connections, there probably never was enough signal to drive anything when I was using line out, and I may have fried at least the speakers' amp by faffing about.

But the speakers work. I've taken the honeytone apart and everything is mounted on a single PCB, so my plan now is:

I've just got a little cube shape cigar box, so I plan to mount at least one speaker and the guts of the honeytone inside that, with the buttons poking through the side and knobs in place of the wheel controls for vol and distortion.

First steps 'n' all that - I'd like to build up to making one of the little amp kits, but every step of this is a big learning experience right now!

Thanks for the tips.

Replies

Stewart Hutton March 13, 2011 at 8:28am

Progress at last!

First, I found this http://www.docstoc.com/docs/24968937/Speaker-Wiring-Diagrams that confirms what Slim said.

Second, I discovered that if I took the output from the headphone socket rather than line out on the eStudio, there is sound at the speakers.

So, even when I was making the right connections, there probably never was enough signal to drive anything when I was using line out, and I may have fried at least the speakers' amp by faffing about.

But the speakers work. I've taken the honeytone apart and everything is mounted on a single PCB, so my plan now is:

I've just got a little cube shape cigar box, so I plan to mount at least one speaker and the guts of the honeytone inside that, with the buttons poking through the side and knobs in place of the wheel controls for vol and distortion.

First steps 'n' all that - I'd like to build up to making one of the little amp kits, but every step of this is a big learning experience right now!

Thanks for the tips.
Stewart Hutton March 11, 2011 at 3:12am

ah - that may be the source of my problem then - i was working on the assumption that one signal going to both speakers plus one ground going to both speakers would = 2 speakers getting the same thing.

i can imagine i may have fried the wee amp, but having taken that out of the mix hopefully i can still use the speakers - or even one of them.

How would I wire 1 speaker to the jack? It seems too simple for words but didnt work for me.

swampapple slim said:

right and left together will not make mono it will short i dont know if short will ruin it though
Stewart Hutton March 10, 2011 at 2:37pm

Let me add my own short version of this (might help someone sometime in the future):

How would you connect 2 speakers in a box to a 1/4" switching socket?

I don't care about the switching bit. In fact, if I got a "regular" 1/4" socket, how would you do it?

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