I’ve been toying around with a speaker bar taken from a TV. I want to plug it into my iPod. However, the speaker bar terminates not in a 3.5mm male plug but in two wires.
I tried taking a pair of old earphones, cutting off a length of wire with the 3.5mm plug, and twisting the wires from the speaker bar and earphone cord together.
Problem is I get no sound.
What’s missing?
Edit: here’s a picture of the speaker bar (top), the 3.5mm male plug (center), and the connection between the speaker bar and the plug (bottom right).
I’d guess the iPod can’t drive those speakers. If you got an amplifier, plugged the iPod and speaker into that, it would probably work. But at that point, you might as well just get a stereo with a dock.
I’m not really sure but someone else should be along shortly. In the interim, it looks like you have the red wire connected to the shielding and not to one of the driving wires so the circuit probably isn’t complete.
However since it is a stereo plug, that shielding wire is also probably important.
Finally, I doubt a small device like an iPod has the power to drive something like that sound bar. You’ll need to match the impedance of the ipod is expecting for headphones (probably 4 or 8 ohms) to the the impedance of the sound bar. Plus you will need some sort of amplification circuit.
In addition to the amplifier issue the headphone cord is stereo and the and the speaker bar appears to be a 2 wire monophonic speaker unless there’s an extra wire I don’t see.
Does the speaker bar plug into AC anywhere? Is it amplified?
That. Either drive the speaker with a stereo/home theater receiver and plug your iPod into that, or get a standalone amplifier (something like this will work fine.)
The speaker bar doesn’t plug into AC anywhere … drat … I suspected it - that my iPod wouldn’t be able to power the big speaker.
I actually salvaged the speakers from a broken LCD TV hoping I could use them somehow, but looks like I’ll have to go out my way to get them working. Is there anyway I could take out the amplifier from the TV? What uses are there for broken LCD TVs? (The screen is cracked - that’s all).
The TV’s internal amplifier circuitry is almost certainly integrated with the rest of it, so that’s probably not going to work.
But a cheapo standalone amp will definitely drive the thing, and it will be less money than buying an amplified iPod speaker of the same power. It won’t sound great, but it’ll be a lot better than headphones.
I really doubt it. I’m guessing it’s not going to be some nice enclosed box like the link above. It’s probably going to be various components scattered across one or two circuit boards that you may or may not even be able to identify as the amplifier.
Then, even if you could, you’d be left with a bunch of unshielded electronics with 120V running through them.
Unless you have something to connect it to (an old 5.1 surround system from a computer maybe?), it’s probably trash.
Even if you wanted to set up surround sound some day, it would make, at best, an ‘ok’ center channel.
What you’ve got isn’t a sound bar (the common name for a one-piece unit that sits in front of the TV and synthesizes surround sound with psychoacoustic effects). At best, it’s probably the center channel speaker from the TV. As noted, you’ll need an amplifier to drive it, and you’ll need to decide if you want it to play the left or the right channel from the iPod. Having only two wires, it’s mono.