(Not sure if this is the right forum category...mods move if necessary.)
My boyfriend just bought a house. Installed in the family room are two in-wall JBL speakers, plus speaker cable in the built-in bookshelves for two more speakers.
He already purchased a nice 6.1-channel Onkyo surround sound system, so he doesn't really need the speakers to hook up to his home theatre. I had the bright idea to take the raw speaker wire hanging out of the wall and solder it to a nice wall plate with RCA jacks, so he can hook up his iPod or something else without needing to turn on his entire home theatre system just to play music. We went out and got a Maxell iPod dock and the wall plate.
However, the in-wall speakers are not self-amplified, which I expected. They were obviously attached to a receiver/amp by the previous owners. Connecting the jacks in the wall plate to the iPod's headphone jack allows for sound output, by turning up the iPod to its maximum volume. This still isn't very usable, and connecting the speakers to the dock's line-out doesn't do anything at all, as the dock has a fixed audio output.
What I'm looking for is some kind of small (I stress small) amp with a volume control that we could hook up between the wall plate and the dock in order to amplify the audio stream enough to make the speakers usable. Does such a thing even exist? We don't want to get another home-theatre-sized amp - there's no room for that in the setup. Is there anything out there that's more compact and portable?
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Would an external sound card work? I noticed that most of them appear to be USB-powered. If that's the case, then wouldn't it be doable to use a USB iPod (or similar) power adapter to power an external card like that? I would assume so, since USB can only output 5V power, which would make one assume that any USB-powered device needs only 5V...
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