Expanding the inputs of Active Speakers

[SonicYouth78]

Hello,

My current stereo system setup includes a pair of active speakers (QA M20), a turntable and a subwoofer. After booking up the components to the speakers, I am left with a USB, an optical and a 3.5mm Aux input. I plan to add a CD player, a cassette deck and a streamer in future. What do I need to tie up all these together? I went through sub subreddits but that's left me even more confused. There are suggestions to use audio splitter or RCA switchbox while some suggested preamps.

Please suggest some solutions and the related budget-friendly products. Thanks!

 

[mbhangui]

Hello,

My current stereo system setup includes a pair of active speakers (QA M20), a turntable and a subwoofer. After booking up the components to the speakers, I am left with a USB, an optical and a 3.5mm Aux input. I plan to add a CD player, a cassette deck and a streamer in future. What do I need to tie up all these together? I went through sub subreddits but that's left me even more confused. There are suggestions to use audio splitter or RCA switchbox while some suggested preamps.

Please suggest some solutions and the related budget-friendly products. Thanks!

You can't use audio splitter. Splitters give you parallel connections. You use splitters to connect one source to multiple outputs. More devices you connect, the impedance keeps getting lowered.

What you need is a RCA switchbox. Many clueless audiophiles call it passive preamp (as if it is amplifying something). A RCA switchbox is a passive device. Some of these also have a volume control, but you don't need that.

Below are two example of RCA switcher / RCA switchbox. A RCA switcher is a total passive device. It doesn't alter the source or the output impedance. Such a switcher will not alter the quality of music.

However If you use a RCA switcher with a volume control, it will alter both the input and output impedance (again few clueless audiophiles call this too as passive preamp). Depending on how bad your current impdenance matching is, such preamps may make your music lively causing the person to exclaim that his preamp does magic. But the result can go downhill too. Ultimately one can spend fortune in acquiring and discarding such mislabled RCA switchers.

Now enough said about snake oil and pitfalls in choosing preamps. Below are 2 examples as promised

This gives you ability to select one out of 6 inputs and also gives you ability to connect to two different devices.




This gives you ability to select one out of 4 inputs and also gives you ability to connect to two different devices.



You can also put a active pre-amp with a built in RCA switcher. An proper active preamp will have a fixed low input impedance and high output impedance that doesn't change (or not much) with volume setting. This is the way to go if you have a mismatched impedance between source output and the amp input. A very good example of this is the Nelson Pass B1 buffer preamp. Many in our forum have made this themself. Be careful when you look for a commercial one. There is mostly snake oil and dark occult practices here like below where the manufacturers will imply magic.



There are affordable and no voodoo marketing claims like devices from Schitt. Take a look here. Old vintage amps came as two units - Preamp unit and AMP units. If you get anyone of these you will not regret. If you love he distorted tube sound (many do), you can also look at preamp units from Acoustic Portrait.

Finally thhen there are these meant for the audiophool's ear's only. They are nothing more than the RCA switchers. But the name change alone commands higher price in the market. Two glorious examples which actually shouldn't have been more than Rs 2000

 

[Kannan]

Hello,

My current stereo system setup includes a pair of active speakers (QA M20), a turntable and a subwoofer. After booking up the components to the speakers, I am left with a USB, an optical and a 3.5mm Aux input. I plan to add a CD player, a cassette deck and a streamer in future. What do I need to tie up all these together? I went through sub subreddits but that's left me even more confused. There are suggestions to use audio splitter or RCA switchbox while some suggested preamps.

Please suggest some solutions and the related budget-friendly products. Thanks!

Most CD players come with optical ouput, so you are covered there. For Cassette deck you can use the 3.5mm aux input on your active speakers, and for streamer, which normally have optical outputs, get an optical switxher (1 in and 2 out) so that you can use either your CD player or streamer. Also your active speakers have Bluetooth with aptx support. In that case you do not require a dedicated streamer. Just use your phone as the streamer or for even better fidelity, connect you phone or laptop directly to the USB port of your speakers to play all streaming content either from phone or laptop. With phone (if android) use USB Audio Pro app to bypass the internal android audio engine.

 

[MaSh]

Hello,

My current stereo system setup includes a pair of active speakers (QA M20), a turntable and a subwoofer. After booking up the components to the speakers, I am left with a USB, an optical and a 3.5mm Aux input. I plan to add a CD player, a cassette deck and a streamer in future. What do I need to tie up all these together? I went through sub subreddits but that's left me even more confused. There are suggestions to use audio splitter or RCA switchbox while some suggested preamps.

Please suggest some solutions and the related budget-friendly products. Thanks!

Very simple. Get a wiim pro or higher. It has an optical input/output, analog input, coax output,etc and it's a streamer. You can hook up cd player to optical input, analog input and just get the coax out to your dac or active speakers. I have a similar connection and it works great.

MaSh