y-spliting speakers

willovercome

willovercome

New member
i want to hook up two sets of speakers to two different sound cards. but each card only has one set of main outputs. should i just use y-spliters, or will the sound levels drop too much? is there another way to do this?
 
I'm a little confused... You have 2 sets of speakers, and 2 sound cards... Are you combining the signals or something? I don't understand where the "Y" adapter comes in...
 
:cool: Can the sound card handle the drop in resistence/increased load?


da MUTT


ps. Don't mix the outputs of both soundcards together into one speaker.
 
If it's a decent sound card you should be fine. I have done "Y" adapters many times on many different things and never poped anything and still had good signal strength. You should be OK to do this. As da MUTT said, don't mix the outputs together!
 
no i won't. i just want to have both set hooked up so i can listen through them seperatly without having to switch any cables around. the reason i need to do this is because i have one card that only does my midi, and another that only does my audio. but, if the signals will still be strong enough to use, then i'll just go the way of the y-spliter.
 
willovercome said:
no i won't. i just want to have both set hooked up so i can listen through them seperatly without having to switch any cables around. the reason i need to do this is because i have one card that only does my midi, and another that only does my audio. but, if the signals will still be strong enough to use, then i'll just go the way of the y-spliter.
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What you may want to look at doing here would be to create a wire that would hook the output of your MIDI card up to an auxiliary input on your sound card, that way you could use you sound card's mixer to mix the audio for you. I did this with my brother's computer because he has a Dolby 5.1 card but the recording was horrible, so he uses 1 card to record and 1 to play back, but there was no way for him to monitor while recording. We soldered a wire onto the line out of his recording card and plugged it into an aux. in on his Dolby card and it works like a charm.
 
In your original post you said "two sets of speakers" do you have 4 speakers or only 2?

If you only have one pair of speakers then do what Joe suggested or get an external mixer. That's what they are made for.
 
Ok... Let me take a stab at what you are doing... You want to be able to listen to the mix on either speaker to get different points of view on the mix?
 
I'd go with a 4 track mixing desk/rack to mix / match or switch between your two sound card outputs.

If you have amplifiers built into your speakers, then
Hook one set of speakers to the master out and the other to the monitor out. You can use the monitor cue feature to rout your signal to your speaker system of choice.

If you need to use an amp then run your master or monitor out to your amp and then hook up a speaker switching box (40 bucks from Radio shack) to the out put of the amp to flip between your different speakers.
 
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