"AZ Nomad" wrote in message

On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 10:08:13 +0100, Dave Plowman (News)
wrote:



You could attenuate the speaker outputs and feed those
into the sound card.

Why do people insist on giving advice for tricks they've
never personally tried?

OK, deal with this. I've hooked line inputs to speaker outs many times,
with and without attenuators depending on the amplifier power levels
involved. It simply works.

The car radio guys even have products, IOW built-up commercial attenuators,
for this purpose. So do the guitarists.

Your idea won't work.

It works like a champ, every time.

Unless getting the sound of a three
year old doing razzberies is what you're looking for.

That is closer to what you will get with mics picking up speakers.

Even a microphone
suspended near the speaker would be an improvement over
your idea.

Nope. It's true that if you have some really good mics and speakers, using a
mic to pick up a speaker can be other than a total disaster.

Not ideal, but it would work. If you're not up to making
such things

I'm not making this up. I've been recording since 1954, and started out
putting mics in front of speakers. In fact there's a funny story about a
friend of mine way back then who made a brief electrical fire by hooking the
line input of a tape recorder to the speaker of an AC/DC tubed radio of the
day. Now that was stupid. Let's hear it for fuses!

a decent car audio place will sell them. Designed to
feed an external amp off the speaker outputs of the head
unit.

No ****. This is the only solution if you need to get
from a speaker level signal to a line level input. You must attenuate
the signal somehow.

Only if it is grossly too big. Also, some speaker outputs have a relatively
big DC voltage on them, so blocking caps are a good idea.

It's funny - people will get very concerned about hooking a line input up to
a speaker output that only puts out a few volts, but not worry about hooking
a line input up to a tape or main output of a tubed preamp that might swing
20 or 30 volts RMS.