Lowest Cost Surround Sound System

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Mine is my bedroom system, used my old Polk Audio computer speakers [mini headphone type stereo plug] along with my Pioneer SX-2300 stereo receiver and 2 Polk Audio Monitor 4 speakers.

I bought 1 mini headphone Y-adapter (~$4) and 2 12 foot mini headphone extension cables (~$11 total), I super glued the 2 extension cables together since they were to be placed behind some bookcases, cut off one of the Y-adapter headphone jacks, used my ohm meter to check which wire was the ground, soldered the other 2 (representing L and R) together, connected the modified headphone jack wires to L+ and R+ on the Pioneer, plugged in the extension cable(s) and the computer speakers.

~$15 total

This QS matrix encoded demo sounds pretty good on my $15 surround sound system:



Kirk Bayne

 

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It turns out that the wires in the mini headphone jack aren't very durable, so I just changed to using a ~$5 Walmart/onn mini headphone jack to RCA stereo plugs Y-adapter.

I soldered one lead of the speaker wire to the red RCA plug outer ring and soldered the other lead to both the red and white RCA plug pins (to provide the same signal to both of the computer speakers), the other end of the speaker wire is connected using the Hafler method to my receiver.

At times, there was "static" from the surround speaker, I eventually traced this to the wires in the mini headphone jack of my original configuration.

With my new configuration, using the Walmart/onn Y-adapter, no "static" and I didn't have to cut into the headphone jack wiring.

Sadly, this increased the price to ~$16


Kirk Bayne

 

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My passive Hafler/DynaQuad "decoder" - the silver painted wire is soldered to both tips of the RCA plugs and the other wire is soldered to the red RCA plug outer ring - the silver painted wire is connected to the L speaker output, the other to the R speaker output on my Pioneer SX-2300 stereo receiver and then to my Polk/HP xt953 PC speakers.


Kirk Bayne