Soundcard and amplifier help

[C.Brutail]

HI!

For a better (and louder )music, I've decided that I'd like to connect my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 soundcard with a good ol' Orion Orister 1015 amplifier.

I got the amplifier from my dad, it sounds very good, but he's afraid that myabe the the hardware is not compatible to eachother. As I don't know shit about the technical part of this, I'd like to ask the hw gurus here, wether I can connect the two devices, or the soundcard's output might hurt the amplifier?

[Urmel]

Unluckily I don't know when your amp was built. But it's not that big deal.

If the amp doesn't get hurt by a CD player or a modern radio tuner (I never heard of such, and I had 70s amps as well), you don't have to be afraid of connecting it.

[BusterDBK]

Thing is I don't know about your amplifier either, but I tried this with a Pioneer A - 656 (it's from the late 80s I think) and it worked perfectly. There should be no trouble as the line out output on any soundcard is, as far as I know, preamp, so you just plug it where a CD player or anything like that would go. Still, if the sound you get directly from the card is very loud (I once had a card that had sepparate ports for speakers and headphones and the headphones port was like that) you could lower the volume just in case.

Have fun!

[Ed]

What you connecting it via? Never had any problem with anything by Phono or 3.5mm Jack. If it's a digital connection, you can't break it but it just wouldn't work.

[SavageX]

As long as your soundcard outputs at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_level

you'll be perfectly fine. Just connect to "line out" and everything will be okay.

Some soundcards used to have an amplifier on-board for headphones and small speakers. Beside having usually worse audio quality than line out outputs (due to the cheap on-board amp) those outputs may very well damage external amplifiers if the output level is too high.