I forget if I put this in the wiki or not as I haven't been very active here lately.
I have piles of radios, ham radios, scanners, computer audio, all running, all the time. It gets annoying to manage all of them individually and the internal speakers on most of this equipment leave a lot to be desired. So my solution to all of this is a compact mixer and an amplified set of speakers.
The amp and speaker combo I use is relatively inexpensive and happens to run off of 12V DC. I happen to have a 50A battery backed up 12V DC system here so this is a big plus. If my power goes out, I still have all my audio running. The mixer holds internal batteries and I just have to switch over to batteries if my power goes out and I'm off and running again.
The amp and speakers.
Dayton Audio T-Amp and B652 Speaker Bundle | Parts-Express.com
For the money these work great, you can also easily use a set of powered PC speakers if you happen to have a set lying around. Again, this setup runs on 12V DC as an option and that was important to me. My previous setup was a set of Bose MediaMate PC speakers, but they run on 12V AC so I couldn't convert them for my power distribution.
The amp itself is not much larger than the HP-1 Home Patrol scanner, hard to tell from the pic.
This setup easily gives me nice sounding music from the computer and plenty of headroom so that I can fill the house up with scanner audio if I want to hear it in the next room.
The mixer.
Roland U.S. - M-10MX: 10-Channel Battery-Powered Mixer
This is a 10 channel mixer and it works great, again a small footprint compared to other options out there.
You'll need all the patch cables of course to connect everything. Lots of sources for those around but All Electronics | Electronic and Electro-Mechanical Parts and Supplies at Discount Prices is one where you can get piles of adapters and patch cables pretty cheap if they happen to have them in stock.
The mixer has a headphone out jack too which is great as I can just turn off the amp and turn up my headphones.
This all gives me a lot of flexibility and vastly increased sound quality over all the tinny internal speakers of my gear.
If you haven't put your radios at least into a pair of computer speakers, you are missing out on much nicer sound quality.
For ham radio use if I'm actively transmitting, it can get annoying with a lot of music and scanners going in the background. I have also configured a PTT foot switch and a relay that disconnects the audio line going to the speaker amp whenever I transmit. This way I have silence while speaking so other people don't have to hear all the background noise going here.
I have piles of radios, ham radios, scanners, computer audio, all running, all the time. It gets annoying to manage all of them individually and the internal speakers on most of this equipment leave a lot to be desired. So my solution to all of this is a compact mixer and an amplified set of speakers.
The amp and speaker combo I use is relatively inexpensive and happens to run off of 12V DC. I happen to have a 50A battery backed up 12V DC system here so this is a big plus. If my power goes out, I still have all my audio running. The mixer holds internal batteries and I just have to switch over to batteries if my power goes out and I'm off and running again.
The amp and speakers.
Dayton Audio T-Amp and B652 Speaker Bundle | Parts-Express.com
For the money these work great, you can also easily use a set of powered PC speakers if you happen to have a set lying around. Again, this setup runs on 12V DC as an option and that was important to me. My previous setup was a set of Bose MediaMate PC speakers, but they run on 12V AC so I couldn't convert them for my power distribution.
The amp itself is not much larger than the HP-1 Home Patrol scanner, hard to tell from the pic.
This setup easily gives me nice sounding music from the computer and plenty of headroom so that I can fill the house up with scanner audio if I want to hear it in the next room.
The mixer.
Roland U.S. - M-10MX: 10-Channel Battery-Powered Mixer
This is a 10 channel mixer and it works great, again a small footprint compared to other options out there.
You'll need all the patch cables of course to connect everything. Lots of sources for those around but All Electronics | Electronic and Electro-Mechanical Parts and Supplies at Discount Prices is one where you can get piles of adapters and patch cables pretty cheap if they happen to have them in stock.
The mixer has a headphone out jack too which is great as I can just turn off the amp and turn up my headphones.
This all gives me a lot of flexibility and vastly increased sound quality over all the tinny internal speakers of my gear.
If you haven't put your radios at least into a pair of computer speakers, you are missing out on much nicer sound quality.
For ham radio use if I'm actively transmitting, it can get annoying with a lot of music and scanners going in the background. I have also configured a PTT foot switch and a relay that disconnects the audio line going to the speaker amp whenever I transmit. This way I have silence while speaking so other people don't have to hear all the background noise going here.
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