Volume control to a speaker

[BHNick]

I have an amplified audio signal from a Peavey speaker jack which I am sending to a speaker in another room. I need to control volume at the second speaker. How do I control the amplitude of the signal to that speaker so as to reduce the volume? Is there a commercially available "black box" with a potentiometer that will do this? How do I approach this?

 

[davenn]

Hi BHNick
welcome to the Electronics Point Forum

what sort of wattage is the amp supplying to the other speaker

On 100V speaker lines its easy, there are wirewound pots for just that use
I have installed dozens of them
But assuming your amplifier out and speaker are an 8 Ohm system then you would probably need to find the highest power wirewound pot that your could find around the 8 to 10 Ohms value. You would put the output of the amp across the 2 outer connections of the pot so the amp always sees a 8 - 10 Ohm load and the speaker would come off one side of the pot and the centre connection

Im also assuming that its the only speaker you have feeding off that output on the amplifier ? ie... no other speakers in series or parallel ?

Dave

 

[KrisBlueNZ]

As davenn hinted at, the problem is the amount of power that the attenuator will have to dissipate. The extra energy is dissipated as heat. You need to tell us the kind of power levels you're working with.

Even wirewound potentiometers have limited heat dissipation, unless you can find a custom-made large wirewound potentiometer - I expect they would exist somewhere.

A feasible solution would be a switched resistor network, using wirewound resistors (with heatsinking if necessary) and a rotary switch (or several). If you want to go that way, you need to specify your impedances, power specifications, adjustment range and adjustment resolution.

A simpler solution would be to use a separate small amplifier for your remote speaker and control the volume at its input.