We have 5 speakers and a sub woofer set up around the room with regular speaker wire. However, our receiver is screwed up and we would like to hook these speakers up directly to the DVD player, which has 5.1 dolby surround and hookups for all of these speakers. The problem is that all the hookups requirethis kind of plug. Our old receiver just has little clips for each end of the wire (as do the speakers themselves). How do we get these plugs onto the ends of our speaker wire? Thanks!
Unless the DVD player you bought is also an amplifier, it’s not meant to drive the speakers. It would have come with speakers if sold as one of these sets. The connectors you are talking about are RCA type connectors. You can purchase connector ends for the wire at Radio Shack, but don’t connect the speakers directly, unless the DVD player has a built in amplifier. Print the make and model and somebody can probably tell you what you have.
It isn’t an amp–it cost $34 brand new. It’s a jWIN JD-VD509. But why does it have hookups for 5 speakers and a subwoofer if you can’t connect the speakers to it?
Some amps require the 5.1 to be feed to them already in the correct analog format, because they don’t decode the sound stream. An amp that decodes 5.1 would have a digital connector. It would be a single RCA jack labeled digital input, or an optical cable jack.
I looked at the manual. You have to have an amplifier. You can connect 5.1 by using the 6 analog jacks. One jack for each channel. You can connect two of the jacks for stereo output. You can connect the digital RCA jack to an amplifier that can decode digital input. You have no optical option. The amplifier can be your television, it doesn’t have to be a home sound system.
You didn’t say what the problems were. The unit menu may need to be reconfigured for the output to work with the amplifier properly.
Technically, it doesn’t have hookups for 5 speakers, it has hookups for 5 channels. Those channels provide the low energy signal that is amplified by your amplifier, to a higher energy signal that can drive speakers. That “line level” signal is approximately the same power you would use to drive headphones, it won’t provide enough juice to run a speaker.
What this does is allow you to have “dumb” amplifiers that do nothing but amplify the signal, while still giving you the complex surround sound encoding. It’s nice if you have an older receiver that doesn’t do the latest and greatest decoding.
Okay, most of this is over my head so I may need to call in some audiophile friends to work it out. Could someone link to a (preferably cheap) amp that would work for this? Thanks for all the help so far.
I think you’re better off simply replacing your receiver if there’s absolutely no hope for your current one.
If you’re going to send separate channels out from the DVD player (a cheap player does this these days?), you’ll need a way to mix them (which a receiver does), amplify them (which a receiver does) provide a crossover between the subwoofer and satellites (which a receiver does), equalize them (bass, treble, that sort of thing - which a receiver does) and so on.
If you’re an audio/HT geek with a lot of money, manually processing separate channels might be a welcome exercise, but if you just want your home theater up and running again you could run out to the nearest electronics hut and have the situation squared away with much less fuss.