This is going to make a lot of you vomit in your mouth a bit, but it's what I have to work with - just a heads up.
So, when I was in my teens, I thought I was awesome because I had a surround sound system with 5 disc changer in my room. I was proud of it because I purchased it with my own money that I made. It was an AudioPhase system that has little information on the internet today -- I was able to find out that it claims it's a 100 watt system (4 speakers, front and rear). When I went into the military, my step-brother decided he didn't like the system and got rid of it.. except for 3 of the 4 speakers. Today I have the front speakers only.
When I got to my first permanent duty station in the military, one of my colleagues offered to sell me a Pioneer system for a hundred bucks. It had what I call a center channel (4 speakers -- inside the HTV-C1) but the selling point, for me, was the 8" subwoofer (HTV-SW1) which was the only thing lacking, in my opinion, with my 5 disc changer. He had blown the stock sub, so I purchased a Cerwin-Vega to put in it. I've been unable to find any information about this driver today - the only information on the speaker is HED8DVC20010103 (the last digits are obviously a date of some kind -- I did purchase it in 2001, so perhaps that's the manufacture date). Googling that (without the date) only shows subs with a red logo and mine is purple so I'm not certain it's the same thing. The red one is also clearly labeled for car audio, and I don't recall the one I purchased being for car audio, but if the price was right I might have overlooked that. Another thing that I did was splice the wire for the speakers inside the center channel, and ran cables out to the front speakers mentioned previously. I did this for two reasons: 1) I was young and stupid. 2) the control center seemed pretty weak (possibly because it was shelved about 3 feet over my head), but with those front speakers attached it sounded great to me.
Over the years, this set up has worked perfectly for my needs. However, over the last year the 6 pin cable (which has 8 ports on the connectors) connecting the center to the sub has broken. I've tried to solder the wires back to the plug and it's worked alright until this last week. Apparently I got two of the wires too close, and I killed the system. The control center receives no power at all. When you plug the sub in, you can hear it click indicating that it's powered. However, I don't trust that amplifier because I don't know what, exactly, happened to kill the control center (perhaps the control center isn't dead.. perhaps the amp isn't sending power due to other faults -- for example). I did take the HTV-C1 apart to see if there was a fuse, or an obviously bad capacitor, but I found nothing. Because of that, I do not want to use that amplifier. I'm perfectly fine with removing it from the box, putting another amp on it and sealing up whatever hole may continue to exist.
I've been looking at 2.1 amplifiers on amazon, and the best one, in my subjective view, appears to do what I need to do to get these items working together but my lack of knowledge in this area has me wondering if I'll just be wasting money which I don't have a whole lot of. Another fear of mine is that the quality is going to be bad even for my low standards -- one review said the crossover was horrible and they ended up putting an inline low pass 80Hz on it to fix it. I'm not sure if I can link this object here, but it's a DAMGOO 50W+50W+100W 2.1amplifier -- Amazon's Choice, currently 284 ratings. Hopefully that should get you to the item I'm looking at. Another thing I've seen in a review is that there could be some kind of delay with this device. Given that this is being plugged into a computer which I'll be gaming on (and watching hockey games on and such), a delay is not exactly what I'd want.
So there's the wall of text. Here's a summary of all of the stuff I have for this:
- 1x Cerwin-Vega 8" dual voice coil, multimeter shows it being 8 ohms, in a ported Pioneer box
- 2x AudioPhase speakers, sticker shows them being 3.2 ohms.
- 4x small speakers inside the HTV-C1. It's not important to get these on the system, but if I can attach a few wires to make a center channel for extremely cheap, why not?
How can I get these items working together so I have decent audio for not a whole lot of money? For input, I prefer 3.5mm or RCA (I already have a 3.5mm to RCA cable). If there is any other information I could provide, please let me know.