I'm trying to set up 4 speakers in my room. Need a power supply and a "control box" for audio in/out and individual volume control. 

Audio in is from a 3.5mm cable and all 4 outs will be too. I would like a fifth out port as I may want to add a subwoofer someday but a fifth port is not a requirement. Budget is $100 max, maybe a bit more if it just isn't possible to do for $100. 

All 4 speakers are Sony SS-RSX80.

What do I need? I know dick all about audio equipment. Help would be greatly appreciated.

Are these Powered  speakers or passive?


Non- hdmi amps are dirt cheap on Craigslist.

I have no idea what that means. 

Uhh... they've always been powered through the 3.5mm jack. There's no separate power cord. So... passive I guess?

ETA: I probably should have mentioned, for those not familiar with my speakers, these aren't tiny desktop speakers. These things are about 15 inches by 9 inches. These are home stereo speakers.

Assuming you don't have the original head unit?  You're probably not going to find any amps that have a 3.5mm out -- most likely you will have to cut the 3.5mm ends off or get/make 3.5mm female plug to bare wire adapter.  Most receivers / amplifiers use either spring terminals for bare wires and/or "banana plug" ports.

If you're just doing stereo something like this might do the trick.


If you want surround it's going to set you back a fair bit more.  It might not be a bad idea to check craigslist etc. as you may be able to score a used one cheap.

No lie.

Shiiiiiit. I did not want to have to build something. Already did that once. 

The whole story behind this is I had 2 of these speakers and wanted to run them through a Spider X Rocker gaming chair (has its own speakers and a subwoofer built in) I have. So I put together a control box with two 3.5mm input ports and after some soldering had it connected to the chairs own power supply. Each speaker also got its own volume control. So the chair controlled/powered the two Sony speakers and its own speakers.

But now after a few years the chair has gone to shit. Padding is shot and the chairs left speaker is toast, stopped working for no apparent reason months ago. So I'm replacing the chair with something that doesn't suck but wanted to keep the 4 speaker setup because it sounds badass and I had two more of the Sony speakers so here we are...

Fuuuuuuuu... I'm gonna end up building another control box myself, aren't I? 

Like posted above, you will need some form of amplifier and that Sony unit would be just fine.

Buy a 3.5mm to RCA adapter cable and plug it into an AUX in on the Sony receiver.

Attach speakers and WIN!

 A quick Google search on that model number takes me to a document showing that these speakers are rated at 24 ohms.  Standard home audio speakers are 8 ohms.  Any amplifier you pick will only put out 1/3 its rated power.  I suggest dropping those speakers off at Goodwill and starting from scratch.

you could go out and get a real job and buy a real system. if you wore out your gaming chair you need to get out of mom's basement and enter the real world. it's your duty

Meh. They get plenty loud for me and have worked just fine for years. They're in a tiny ass bedroom. Besides, I don't have the money to redo this from scratch. Not happening.

Ok, hold on. Ideas are coming to me and some of the retard fog is lifting. 

What if I just get a stereo with 4 speaker outs? That'd work, right? Fuck the 3.5mm jacks, I'll strip them and go bare wire or RCA or whatever the fuck. Is there a cheap ass stereo with one 3.5mm audio in and 4 speaker outs? Pretty sure that will work...

It sounds like these speakers send the power through the 3.5mm jack.  In this case RCA wouldn't help unless you have an amp / receiver that has speaker level out on RCA connectors (a lot of PC / "multimedia" speaker sets do this)

Ouch yeah 24 ohms is going to be tough -- need a lot of voltage to drive those.  Most home audio devices are 4-8 ohm so those are the impedance levels that most amplifiers are rated at (typically 8 ohm and 6 ohm).  4 channels with independent speaker level controls is generally going to require a 5.1 receiver.  It can be done with a component system (separate equalizer / pre-amp and power amp) but that's probably vastly outside of your budget, much more so than an 5.1 HT receiver.

I'll bet you can find a cheap 5.1 receiver on ebay / craigslist.  It's not going to get the speakers very loud due to the extremely high impedance but it might do the trick in a pinch.

If you don't mind spending a little more, and can work with 2.1 (stereo + sub) below is a great set for the money.  I run them at my office -- I have the office space to myself and work late into the night often so I can crank up the sound and these speakers are more than adequate for casual music listening.

Wire 2 in series, left and right pairs @ 12 ohms each.
Most amps will handle 16 ohm loads.

If you don't actually need 4 separate channels you could run the speakers in parallel.  The impedance is high enough that in parallel the effective per-channel impedance would be about 12 ohm which is still way into the safe zone.  In that case the stereo receiver I posed above would work nicely.

If you only have one 3.5mm in then you're only passing 2 channels of signal.  The main feature lost by going with a stereo receiver / amplifier is that you wouldn't have individual control of levels on each speaker, just on each side / pair of speakers.

Ok. This is beginning to make more sense. I'm thinking of getting a used stereo instead of new. Can likely get something more "heavy duty" at a lower cost that way. I don't care if it's not new as long as it works. And no, I don't really need 4 separate channels. I guess. I didn't before. I wouldn't even know how to set it up. Not sure it would matter, this setup is used pretty much exclusively for gaming. Not sure I "need" 4 channels for that...

I really don't know what else I can use besides the 3.5mm. I'm running the audio out from my TV. It's got an orange "Digital Audio Out" port. Would that be better? I can snap pics if you want so you can actually see what I'm talking about. 

Thanks for the help by the way. I know it's probably mildly frustrating trying to explain all this to someone who knows so little about this stuff. 

Have you tried Home Depot?   Don't fucking goto Lowes.

No Home Depot here. We do have Lowes but it sucks ass. 

If you can find a 5.1 receiver in your price range it will almost certainly have optical and coaxial digital input ports.  Newer ones may have HDMI.  Digital is the way to go if available.  If the TV and receiver have coaxial that's probably the easiest since it just uses a regular RCA cable, although the optical cables can be had for cheap too (Amazon, Monoprice, etc.)  Digital should also give you surround sound for gaming / movies / etc.

Pretty much every stereo or surround system produced from the late 70's until 2005 or so  can do that. They can be found on Craigslist all day long for $50.

IE: I have a Denon AVR5700 series receiver that has what you need, 130W X 5.1 of serious power, sounds awesome, cost more than $2500 in 1995, but nobody wants it, because no HDMI switching.

I'd be lucky to get $100 for it now.

Ahh... I see. The Digital Audio Out port on my TV is indeed coaxial, says so right under the port. 

Ok. I'm going to need to research this some more and figure out what I can get my hands on within my budget and go from there. I think I have a plan now. Thanks a lot! 

No one has asked your goals of this project.  Just music?  Surround sound?

Audio sources.  TV?  CD?  Tape?  8-Track?  Record?  Phone?

There are hundreds of ways to power your speakers but we really need to narrow down the options since this thread is all over the place.