So I was at Goodwill again two weeks ago, and did the 60 second tour. Nothing great, except this giant-ass black cabinet. Even larger than the Klipsch Forte II's, and covered in the same material as the Peavey gear from not too long ago.
What was it? A Yamaha S4115h speaker. I have no idea what type of speaker it is. I assume it's for live sound, or some PA equipment. It uses those 1/4" jacks which I still have, but unfortunately I have no amp. Also, there's only one speaker! What the hell is with people donating only one speaker! Oh well it's $10, so I decide to buy it. It's got a huge metal horn on top, and a 15" woofer below. I bet the efficiency on this thing is far north of 95db, meaning it will get loud, with almost no power.
I roll this outside and try to fit it in my car. No go. We wrestle for it a bit and somehow get it in the back seat. Well I get it home and it sits in the garage for two weeks. Rosey doesn't even notice it for most of that time. Meanwhile I'm looking for a way to power this thing. None of my amps or receivers output with a 1/4" phono plug. The Peavey PA-400 did, but that's long gone. I went to Guitar Center and picked up a 1/4" female to banana plug adapter (I have a 1/4" 6ft speaker cable at home from the PA-400). In addition I found an E-MU 1212m sound card that I'm going to try out. It was $40.
What's funny is the adapter for the speaker was $15!!! The damn speaker was only $10. Not the greatest investment ever. Well I was lazy for a week and never hooked it up, so on a subsequent visit to the Goodwill they apparently found some 20ft 1/4" to banana plug cables. They had two of them which lead me to believe there should be another speaker...somewhere. Anyways the cables were only $1 each so I bought them up and returned the adapter.
This weekend I pulled the Onkyo DS575 5.1 receiver out of the closet and dragged it to the garage with my laptop. I plugged it all up, and noticed there was something stuck in one of the inputs of the speaker. I grabbed it with my Gerber multi-tool (thanks Rosey!) and yanked it out. Well it was a broken off 1/4" phono that someone must have sheared off. Powered it on and turned up the volume slowly.
Test material? Journey Remastered in FLAC lossless through my USB Creative MP3+ adapter, using RCA interconnects to the receiver. I guess I could have used the optical out, oh well.
So I turned it up to 50, or half with the speaker facing away and I could hear it clearly reflecting off the building.... 200 feet away across the street. Wow this thing is loud. The sound quality? Well it IS a PA speaker, so it wasn't that great. That's not really what it was designed for anyways, so no big deal. This thing is a HUGE party speaker. Just one channel running not even close to a full 80 watts @ 8 ohms was breaking 100db easily. Rosey came running outside like something had blown up and told me she couldn't hear the TV inside the house because it was so loud. I only had it up half way! I cleaned it up a little, there was dust all over it and inside the horn, and it only got louder.
Rosey wants me to sell it. It was only $10... I wonder if I can get $200 out of it? I'm not sure. I'll test the waters. If not I'm going to Ace hardware, ordering some chains and hanging it from the garage ceiling.
Ratings:
Price: $10
Status: Stored
Condition: 3.00 Stars
Cost: .5 Stars
Flippable: 3.5 Stars
Potential Income: Unknown
