Possible to drive 2 12's with a headphone out?

[badgercore]

I've got a little Orange Crush10 combo and I'm wondering if there's any way I can get the headphone out to power a 2x12 cabinet?

The cab is a custom build with 2 Celestion Seventy 80's, wired to a single jack. Unfortunately, I just bought it from someone that wasn't the builder, so no idea what impedance it's wired at right now.

I know the headphone out works with phones, and it works plugged into a little USB interface, but I get no signal when plugging straight into the cab.

I'm trying to sell an old vehicle right now to buy a Tiny Terror, but until then, it would be nice if I could use the Crush with some better speakers. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time!

[nashvillebill]

Nope, you won't have any volume out of the headphone jack.

I'd recommend seeing what speaker you have in there now. It likely says the impedance on the speaker, if not you will have to measure it.

Now look at the speakers in the cab. What are they(impedance)? They will be wired either in series or in parallel, either doubling or halving the nominal impedance of one speaker.

If you are lucky, the speaker cab has the exact same total impedance as the combo. In that case, you would disconnect the combo's speaker and put in a speaker jack.

Post up what you've got, pics of the wiring in the cab would be helpful, and we can go from there.

[olddawg]

If it is a solid state output amp it will not care what the load is as long as it isn't less than the minimum design load. In most cases that is 4 ohms and can frequently be 2 ohms. I would just take it apart and wire an extension jack on the back of the cab. I have an old combo that I sometimes use as a head. What I did is wire a 1/4" jack on the output and wired a right angle plug on some wire to the internal speaker. When I want to use the internal speaker, I plug it in. When I use the amp as a head, I unplug the internal speaker and plug it into a cab. You can get fancy, wire in self switching jacks, selector switches or whatever, but that is the easiest way to do it. You would rarely ever want to run the internal speaker and a cab together anyway.

[badgercore]

Thank you for the responses!

It is a solid state amp, and it actually looks like this will be pretty easy to affix an output jack upon opening it up. I'm charging the camera to take pics right now, but the speaker is rated at 8 ohms.

The output from the amp connects to the speaker with small clips, not sure what they're called (I'm beyond newb at this), but there are two small prongs coming from the speaker and the wires from the amp board have clip looking ends that slip over the prongs. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, I'm thinking it wouldn't be too hard to find an assembled jack with those types of prongs already attached at the ends so I could simply slip the clips from the amp over them.

Now, I'm about to open the cab to inspect it and try to determine the impedance there. Will post pictures of both asap.

Thanks again!

[Steve Conner]

Those clips are called blade or faston terminals, as far as I know. Might be worth taking the amp with the back removed to your local electronics store, Radio Shack, Maplin or whatever, and explaining what you want done. They might be able to give you some terminals that fit and some advice.

If it were me, I would buy a 1/4" jack to jack speaker cable, snip it in half, strip the ends, stuff the bare wires into the "clips", and secure with lots of electrical tape to stop the terminals shorting against each other and blowing the amp. That's not good enough for a permanent fix, but at least it'll let you hear how it sounds. I expect it'll sound pretty good, Orange weren't born yesterday.

For a permanent fix, you probably want to install a jack as was described above. If you don't have a pair of wire cutters and strippers, a soldering iron, a drill and the like, it might be worth taking the amp to a local repair guy and asking him to install the speaker jack for you. Maybe he can do it for less than it would cost you to buy all the tools you'd need.

[badgercore]

Steve,

Yes! I've heard them referred to as blade terminals before as well, I just couldn't drag that out of the back of my brain.

Seeing as how I demand immediate satisfaction, have a spare 1/4" cable, and don't plan to use the original speaker any time soon, I will give your idea a try as soon as I get home this evening.

Btw, I did open the cab and it was marked inside as being wired for 80 watts at 8 ohms, so since the original speaker was at an impedance of 8 ohms, I shouldn't have to do anything other than the method you've described, correct?

Thanks!

[olddawg]

They are called spade lug terminals I believe. I would recommend soldering the wires to the jack. (if they short on the jack your amp is toast) You can get a cheap pencil soldering iron and some diagonal cutters for under $10 if you can't borrow them. You can also use a knife or a pair of scizzors in a pinch to strip wires. Lamp cord makes great speaker wire if you need to replace it with a linger piece. I wouldn't solder directly to the speaker terminals (although it is done all of the time). Use the spade lugs there.

[badgercore]

So here's how I'm planning to proceed:

Gonna drill a hole in the back plate of the amp big enough to feed a 1/4" cable through.

Going to feed the 1/4" cable through the hole, cut/strip the end off and solder each wire to the "male" end of a spade terminal.

Tape any exposed wire between the sleeve and the terminal on the 1/4" cable.

Then just slip the "female" spade terminals from the amp board over the new "male" terminals on the speaker ends.

Also, I'll probably go ahead and fix the cord into place through the hole drilled in the back plate with a glue gun or epoxy. The less soldering I have to do, the better, I can wire but I have zero soldering experience.

Please let me know if you see any gaping holes in my walkthrough here. If everything looks good, I'll swing by RadioShack on the way home and try to get this done tonight.

Thanks again for all your time and feedback!

[Steve Conner]

Looks fine. You don't really need to glue the cable, just stick it through the hole and tie a knot in it, the knot won't fit through the hole so the cable is trapped.

You can also get spade terminals that crimp on, so you don't need to solder them, but you need the proper crimp tool, or they don't really fit tightly.

If you REALLY don't want to solder, just get a couple of terminal blocks or wire nuts, cut the spade terminals off the wires coming out of the amp, and join them with the wire nuts. Good grief, this is going straight to the ghetto

[badgercore]

Steve,

Believe me, I considered doing that with wire nuts, but I'd like to leave the spade terminals on the amp in tact so it's relatively close to factory condition. That way, if I ever wanted to resell it, I could just stick a plug in the hole I drilled in the back plate.

I'm debating on whether to go through with this at all now as I stopped by a little music shop on the way home to get a speaker cable and ended up buying a used KMD XV100SD tube head.

However, just from monkeying around with the KMD a little, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to open a new thread on an issue I'm having with it.

Haha, at least I'm really diving head first into amplifier maintenance.

Thanks!