CF3 Sound System – New Speaker?

I’m trying to resolve a lot of issues before I get to fully re-assembling my droid. It’s a real pain to pull him apart and I want to fix a bunch of things that have been bugging me like the slow dome. Another thing on my to-do list is the speaker.

I chose to use a 15W Horn Speaker on the recommendation of someone, and it does reproduce R2’s tinnie/metallic/middy sounds great. The price was right at the time too, but I think I can do better. It’s not as loud as some R2’s I’ve heard using in similar setups – which is my main motivation to find something different. The horn also takes a lot of space and I’m hoping to re-appropriate that for some electronics.

I’ve spend some time learning all about Ohms, Watts, Dbs and how they related to speakers and amplifiers. We’ve all heard the terms when we go out and buy the latest home theater surround system, but I never really understood what that meant in reality, e.g. you have 4 x 4 ohm 30Watts speakers and how that turns into how loud the speaker system is in Dbs.

Part of the problem deciding which new speaker(s) I should use is that the specs on the CF3 sound system I’m using from ACS are rather vague. They say the built in amplifier can deliver 20 Watts, but they don’t say if that’s across both channels, or if it’s per channel. And they don’t state how many Ohms the speaker should have.

With some digging I found that the sound board uses an AD 1994 chip, and here’s a summary of the specs

  • 105 dB dynamic range
  • 2 x 25 W output power (6 Ω)
  • 1 x 50 W output power (3 Ω)

As you can see it’s rated at 50W for one channel or 25W on two. A lot more than the 20W than that ASC rates the CF3 system at. Also notice the 3 and 6 ohm for the speakers. Most speakers you find are either 4 or 8 ohm, maybe 16. Even if the amplifier can only do 20W, my current horn speaker falls short of taking advantage of that.

Tomorrow I’m going to call them up and ask some questions and report back.

Useful links –

Posted by Chris on December 7th, 2007 in Electronics | 2 Comments

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