VOGONS

Experiments with PC speakers

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First post, by songoffall

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Back in the day, most IBM PC compatibles came with two flavors of PC speakers - a piezo buzzer and a cone speaker, one of those you might see in an FM radio.

These days, they usually come with the piezo buzzers. I don't mind them, when it comes to their basic function. But for games that use the PC speaker for sound, the buzzer just won't do.

You can get cone speakers on Ebay and Amazon and maybe the local electronics store - usually 0.3w 8ohm speakers.

But I decided to experiment - I had an old beaten up Beats headphone, and the drivers in it were 8ohm, so shouldn't harm the motherboard. Took them out of the case, soldered a Dupont 4-pin connector to it and connected to the board.

Did it work? Absolutely. The sound quality? Quite impressive for a PC speaker. But boy is that thing loud. I think I might need to add a trim pot to it to be able to tune the volume.

Adding a video demonstration of it in action.

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Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz/GeForce FX 5500/Creative Audigy 2
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Reply 1 of 3, by Robbbert

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I do have a number of pcs that have a piezo beeper, but in every case they also have an onboard sound device. The problem is that some machines (usually towers) don't come with an internal speaker for it, you're expected to plug in an external one in order to hear anything.

But, even so, some (but not all) still have a small white socket on the board for an internal speaker, should you wish to use one. I tried a couple of machines and it works well. But for the machines without a socket, oh well, I guess they were at the cheaper end of the range. Or something.

Reply 2 of 3, by Tiido

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The things that look like piezo buzzers actually aren't that in most cases, but electromagnetic buzzers with a specific resonance peak. But yeah, a cone speaker will sound muuuuuch better than those little buzzers do, regardless of if they're actual piezo or electromagnetic ones. The freq range is much broader on a cone. The loudness is due to up to 5V squarewaves as the drive signal, there's no way it isn't loud 🤣.

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Reply 3 of 3, by songoffall

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Tiido wrote on 2025-01-29, 22:58:

The things that look like piezo buzzers actually aren't that in most cases, but electromagnetic buzzers with a specific resonance peak. But yeah, a cone speaker will sound muuuuuch better than those little buzzers do, regardless of if they're actual piezo or electromagnetic ones. The freq range is much broader on a cone. The loudness is due to up to 5V squarewaves as the drive signal, there's no way it isn't loud 🤣.

Having done some work on guitar amps, there are ways to soak up some energy out of the output signal 😀) the trick is to keep the overall resistance of the schematic at 8ohms so you don't destroy the motherboard.

The right way to do it, of course, would be to convert it to line level and then send it through, say, the aux input on the sound card 😀) but that would take a lot of time.

I just love the meaty crunch this new PC speaker has to it.

P2 300MHz/Matrox Mystique/Sound Blaster AWE 32 Value
Pentium 3 733MHz/3dfx Voodoo 3 3000/Aureal Vortex 2 (Diamond Monster Sound)
Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz/GeForce FX 5500/Creative Audigy 2
Core2 Quad Q9400/GeForce 8800GT/Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty

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