Wow how old are these speakers?

The very old Sound Blaster cards came with an amplifier. Starting with the Sound Blaster 16 you could disable the amp and have a line-out. Many cards had both outputs (line-out and an amplified one).

But after that it's all line-out. So your best bet is to just get powered speakers.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Wow how old are these speakers?

The very old Sound Blaster cards came with an amplifier. Starting with the Sound Blaster 16 you could disable the amp and have a line-out. Many cards had both outputs (line-out and an amplified one).

But after that it's all line-out. So your best bet is to just get powered speakers.

I think they are from 1997. I found them online for a couple of bucks, brand new, never opened. They look like this:

What about the SB Live cards, or Audigy? I see creative has beta drivers for win7 for both these cards.

I once found a pair of old Altec Lansing speakers out for trash that were high end speakers in their day that I have been using for years. They are white with blue, cloth grilles over the speakers and the sound is great.

You can look on eBay for sound card amps which go into the 5.25" drive bay. They should be quite cheap. But so are new powered ones 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

You can look on eBay for sound card amps which go into the 5.25" drive bay. They should be quite cheap. But so are new powered ones 😀

I second that, I purchased a cheap Logitech branded 5.1 powered speaker system for a c note at Fry's.

You can get the powered 2.1's for much less then this of course.

For the pricing they sound really good too.

I have these speakers for my time machine:

http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/3594/img1254ew.jpg

2.0 speakers give you IMO better retro sound. At least when I grew up the concept of subwoofers didn't exist yet 😀