Too Loud

[oneamongthefence]

Ok, I have some cheap radio shack powered speakers.
The other day I found a powered subwoofer and hooked it up, but for some reason I think I did something wrong, because now my cheap radioshack speakers are rediculously loud. I have the windows volume one tick over mute and they're still really loud. I have the sub hooked up the the sound card out and the speakers connected to the subwoofer's out. I know its probably something really obvious, but I don't know much about subwoofers or speakers in general. The subwoofer was part of the Boston Micromedia System.

[Kaboom]

my bet is that given that the subwoofer's powered, its sending an already amplified signal to the powered speakers assuming they are passive. careful with this as odds are u are overdriving the amps built into the speakers.
To see if it is in fact this, connect the rat-shack speakers to a discman's line out or just back the way they were connected to the soundcard before.
the way around this is to connect the subwoofer to a dedicated output from the soundcard. if the computer or the soundcard are less that 4 or 5 years old, this should be really easy to do. if not, then i guess that if the subwoofer has an independent volume control u could just use a splitter and connect both the sub and the speakers to the same jack through the splitter.
if the sub doesnt have a volume control, then there will either be too much or too little bass and u're basically f´ucked.
cheers!

[Florian]

rat-shack
Das Radio Shack have that bad of a reputation? I always liked them for looking for small electronics and fuses.

-Flo

[Kaboom]

hell i wouldnt know, i'm spanish! I'm just calling it what i hear everyone else call it. In fact i'm relly jalous of you americans. You have wonderful stablishments like home depot, wall mart or radio shack, which are all excellent at doing their thing. there's nothing like those over here in spain, which means that finding a lot of things is MUCH harder, if they are even imported into this crap country at all

[poneal]

placing the master volume at 30% and mixer volume at 30%. That should tone things down. If not, then get a cheap $30 Sound Blaster Live 24 card and use that. It's what I use to drive my receiver. I had similiar results until I got this card. The other was built onto the mother board. Regards, Paul.