I do the exact same thing, I use an old Marantz amplifier into a big floor standing hifi speaker. The Marantz has bass, mid and treble controls, plus low and high filters, which allows me to select any sort of audio bandpass I want. I can select various receivers and have one speaker in the shack, plus the tape out if I want to record something.
My K2 audio sounds fine on cw. Not a huge amount of background hiss from the chips and there seems to be plenty for me. I don't have the ssb board, so cant say how it sounds on ssb, but that is somewhat pointless to me anyway. Funny, but there are good sounding modern swl receivers, with nice speakers, adequate audio power, bass and treble controls, etc. The very expensive ham gear has general coverage, but what for? Maybe the manufacturers limit the fidelity to reduce the noise, but that should/could be an adjustable option... Brett N2DTS > I plan to put an external amplifier and speaker on my K3. > > The K2 was designed with audio 'just strong enough' so that the the > receiver current drain would be low, and the K3 does not draw a huge > amount of receive current either - which tells me that there is not a > BIG audio amplifier in it either - but it will be adequate, > the bare K2 > *is* adequate in most situations, just not powerful and not > 'hi-fi'. To > expect great sound from a tiny speaker and an LM380 amplifier > is simply > unrealistic IMHO. > > I run all my shack receivers into an external audio > amplifier. I have a > dedicated 'communications quality' amplifier/speaker > combination with a > homebrew audio mixer as the front end. There is a good > quality stereo > system here in the shack/office that I can feed the receivers > into if I > want the best fidelity audio, but that is not usually the > case for ham > receivers. > > Bottom line is that I have never encountered a modern ham > receiver with > an internal speaker that has what I would call good audio - that went > away when the big vacuum tube behemoths with their big > external speakers > and big transformers went out of production, so I provide my own. > > 73, > Don W3FPR > > _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
