Purchased vintage speakers and looking or advice on setting up with pc

Stillmat1k

New Member
May 2, 2021
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I recently purchased a pair of Ohm Walsh 4 speakers and I'm looking for some advise and guidance on how to best set them up. I have very little experience with audio but I do appreciate quality audio so any and all help is appreciated.

I do not have any other kind of hardware aside from my PC which has an inexpensive sound card (Creative Sound Blaster Z). I use my PC to play my movie files on my TV which has a sound bar as well. My pc is also my main source of music. I have a large collection of high quality .flac music files. I have some small active speakers that I use if I'm not using my headphones. I occasionally game as well and will use my headphones for that.

So my main concern is these speakers are passive and so need something to power them. However I'm a little confused on what I need exactly... Pre amp, amp, DAC, receiver, etc.

I do have some old receivers laying around and I was planning on testing those out to see how they work. One is a Yamaha SW-201 and another is a newer but I believe lower quality Samsung receiver (model unknown but will update). One concern with the Yamaha is that there's no HDMI. Another is that assuming I'm mostly going to be playing digital audio files and movies that this receiver is outdated and won't be able to output the quality of my files? In this case would I need a better receiver? Or maybe just a DAC? Can I even hook up a DAC to my pc and then directly to the speakers or do I have to have a receiver? Does a receiver replace an amp since it has one built in? Maybe I should look at a good used newer receiver?

I don't want to spend a ton of money as I just spent $700 on these speakers but I understand that I might need to in order to achieve the audio they're meant to put out. I'd eventually like to get a record player to use with it as well.

What are your recommendations all things considered? Sorry for rambling... Just thought some context would help.
 

K3RMIT

Well-Known Member
Sep 4, 2020
390
139
113
try the green output jack on the sound card , use the tape input on the receiver . there are many bottle necks to think about while you play your music . maybe compare your headphones taking note of changes . the speakers are old and may need work both cross over electronics , cone , foams and voice coil membrane . they are 6 or lower in imp and i dont know the imp curve . i say this cause there are parts of this that make sound changes , that can be misleading to conclusions . play and post i love vintage stuff
 

Stillmat1k

New Member
May 2, 2021
2
0
1
36
try the green output jack on the sound card , use the tape input on the receiver . there are many bottle necks to think about while you play your music . maybe compare your headphones taking note of changes . the speakers are old and may need work both cross over electronics , cone , foams and voice coil membrane . they are 6 or lower in imp and i dont know the imp curve . i say this cause there are parts of this that make sound changes , that can be misleading to conclusions . play and post i love vintage stuff
I've gotten a ton of responses on another forum that helped me get things setup. Long story short, I bought a used Pioneer receiver and I'm using that to power the speakers. The speakers are connected to my PC via HDMI. I found this to be the easiest way to get them working and the audio quality sounds pretty damn good, although I haven't been able to get it plugged in via RCA to Aux which was my initial goal. The reason why I wasn't able to do this is because apparently my soundcard doesn't allow power to passive speakers. I also recently connected an old Yamaha sub from my old sound system since I'm a heavy bass lover and I love it. The speakers sounded fine without a sub already, but the sub made it even better. All in all I have to say that I love the speakers. They sound great for music and movies. I believe Ohm recommends to have the speakers separated by about 10 - 12 feet for best sound. Unfortunately my room doesn't allow for this so currently they sit like 8 - 9 feet apart. I haven't had a chance to move them around my room to see how it sounds in other corners of the room, but I think they sound great as is. I do have roommates and ever since I got the sub they say it's kind of loud lol but they're going to have to just deal with it because I like my audio haha.
 

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