pc speaker

Thread Starter

setsunaseiei

Joined Mar 25, 2009
12
I have this very cheap pc speaker. I am planning to crack it open and make it sound a bit more with bass( low freq) or tweeter if not. Is it possible to make a normal 8ohm (i guess) speakers into something else? Like any circuits that I could study and port it to the speaker? Thanks.
 

Audioguru

Joined Dec 20, 2007
11,248
My pc speakers have 3" drivers that have rubber surrounds and pretty big magnets.
The drivers resonate in free air at about 85Hz.
The enclosures are pretty big for 3" drivers and have little holes that are too small to be ports. The drivers in the enclosures resonate at about 120Hz so frequencies down to 90Hz are loud and frequencies down to 50Hz can be heard. If the enclosures are ported properly then frequencies down to 80Hz will be loud but frequencies from 50Hz to 60Hz will not be heard.

Your speakers are probably cheap with 2" or 3" drivers without rubber surrounds and with tiny magnets. They probably resonate in free air at 160Hz to 180Hz.
The enclosures are probably too small so the combined resonance is 250Hz and there is no bass produced below about 220Hz like a cheap clock radio. Adding a port will not help.

I took my cheap clock radio and replaced its 3" speaker with a better one. The space inside the clock radio is enough for a 3" speaker. I made my own amplifier and added lots of bass boost and it sounds pretty good when the volume is turned down. The bass boost is always boosted to the same high level and the volume control adjusts the higher frequencies so that the bass boost never causes the amplifier to clip. When the volume control is turned up pretty loud then the bass has no boost.

I used a 4" woofer in a ported enclosure as the sub-woofer for my beach portable sound system about 25 years ago. The port tuned the combination to 45Hz. It produced loud frequencies down to 50Hz.

A cheap speaker also makes a poor tweeter. It is a shrieker, not a speaker.

The 3" drivers in my pc speakers look like this:
 

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Wendy

Joined Mar 24, 2008
23,415
The normal cheap 2" speakers are pretty simple. They were originally used in the days of small transistor AM radios, and were moved to computers because they were cheap. They aren't meant for high fidelity sounds. They also make decent microphones, and were used in microphones and cheap (that word again) walkie talkies (kids toys mostly).
 

kkazem

Joined Jul 23, 2009
160
Hi,
You won't be able to do much of a modification to your cheap PC speaker; however, it's worth dissecting it for the educational value of it without spending much money.
Regards,
Kamran Kazem
 
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