Powering a pair of panasonic bookshelf speakers

[Matthew Zepess]

I bought a pair of panasonic bookshelf speakers the other day for cheap. The sticker on the back says they take 80 watts with a 6 ohm impedance. Im trying to hook these up to a sears lxi record player that has a built in pre amp that uses rca for its output. Only thing is after splicing a rca on these speakers they sound like they just dont have enough power getting to them. Will a cheap lepai amp off amazon get them sounding good? Or will i have to buy something better?

 

[ProtegeManiac]

Quote:

I bought a pair of panasonic bookshelf speakers the other day for cheap. The sticker on the back says they take 80 watts with a 6 ohm impedance. Im trying to hook these up to a sears lxi record player that has a built in pre amp that uses rca for its output. Only thing is after splicing a rca on these speakers they sound like they just dont have enough power getting to them. Will a cheap lepai amp off amazon get them sounding good? Or will i have to buy something better?

 

If what you actually did was mutilate the RCA cable and then hooked them up to the speakers, you're not actually using an amplifier. You are using the phono preamp, which, given that it's called a phono preamp, is not a speaker amplifier. Some integrated (speaker) amplifiers just have a phono preamp on a small section of their preamp circuit boards. In digital and headphone terms that would be like wiring a headphone into a DAC without an amplifier circuit, because apparently the fact that it has no output labelled "headphone" wasn't enough of a clue that that's now how it works.

 

Order the Lepai amp since it's cheap, however the only guarantee is that it will play a lot louder than the phono preamp with mutilated cables. There's no guarantee that it will sound fantastic because that will depend on the speaker - its response, how sensitive it is (conversely, how hard it is to drive), proper placement to manage room modes, etc.