Hi! My old boombox has more or less given up the ghost, and I’m about ready to give it away somewhere to be rid of the thing. Before I do though, I know it is the case that the speakers themselves work fine, it’s just the unit that’s unhappy.
I was wondering, is there any way to hook up these speakers to headphone jack of some sort? So, for instance, I could plug them into my iPod, and have the music come out of the speakers? I am far from an audiophile, but when I looked at the back, the speakers were connected to the unit by two wires each, one red and one black (the ends of the wires are naked). Does anyone have any idea what sort of product or connector I might want in order to go about doing this properly?
Thank you very much!
Your IPod won’t have enough power by itself to drive the speakers. When you said “headphone jack” I thought you might mean the one on an amplifier. You might be able to crank that loud enough to drive a pair of speakers. For the IPod, you’ll have to use either “passive speakers” (which don’t put out much sound) or amplified speakers.
I don’t need anything particularly portable. Do you know where I might find such an adapter and a cheap amplifier? (It doesn’t need to go that loud.)
Does the boom box work at all? If the radio still works, you can get by with one of those mini-FM transmitters that’s designed to let you play your IPod through your car stereo. If it has a working cassette player, you can get a similar cassette doodad.
If the boom box has a working micropohone or auxiliary input, you can get a patch cord at Radio Shack and plug the IPod in through that.
Otherwise, you’re going to need to remove the speakers, find an amplifier, hook up speaker wire to the amplifier outputs, solder it to the back of your speakers and run your IPod through the amplifier.
You can get a mini-amplifier at Radio Shack for $12.99, but it’s very low powered (and it doesn’t even have stereo connections.) You’ll then need a patch cord from the headphone output to bare ends. Or you can get a pair of powered speakers at some place like Big Lots for 10 bucks and just plug your IPod directly into them.
I like playing with this stuff as much as anyone, but powered desktop computer speakers have just about eliminated low-priced/hobbyist amplifiers.
Get a set of bookshelf speakers with their own amplifier to plug into the headphone jack.