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?

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.

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!

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.

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.