Today, I was thinking about this a bit. For the playroom speaker setup, I had given up on my amp because it didn't fit in the space I had, so I was just using computer speakers. The computer speakers are based off of a subwoofer that plugs into the wall, which takes the input via minijack, amplifies the signal, and sends it to two little satellite speakers via another minijack. Finally, I had the a-ha moment! The amp is in the subwoofer! It's itty-bitty compared to a stand-alone amp, and it sits on the floor unobtrusively. So hypothetically I could replace the chintzy satellite speakers with real SPEAKER speakers. The only* catch is that real speakers hook up via speaker wire, and the chintzy satellites hook up via minijack. How hard could it be to fix that?
As it turns out, not hard at all. My first idea was to wire up a new minijack to speaker wire; that'd require a trip to Radio Shack for something like this:
That's a little complicated, though, since you need semi-precise soldering ability. I figured I could probably come up with a simpler plan, and after a little research, my revised idea was this:
Radio Shack asks a mere $9 for this beautiful RCA-to-speaker-wire cable. Not bad, and eliminates the need for soldering. But, I thought, if it's that simple, I have plenty of RCA cables sitting around in a box. PLENTY of them, and not much use for them. So, I figured, what's the worst that could happen? I cut the ends off of a perfectly good six-foot Monster Cable stereo RCA cable, stripped it down, twisted the ends, and voila. I had a high-quality equivalent to Radio Shack's cable.
So at the end of the day, the setup is as follows:
Wall socket → Inexpensive Computer-Speaker Subwoofer → Minijack-to-RCA adapter → Barrel adapter → RCA-to-bare speaker wire → Speakers
I'm having fun with the images in this post, so visually we have:
