Since it wasn't being used, I decided to take them and use them as laptop speakers. Why doesn't anyone use the Pioneer/Infinity set? Well, many reasons.
For starters, it lacks a center speaker. When my dad bought this, surround sound wasn't the in thing to have, so it wasn't necessary to have a center speaker (or have left/right speakers, because we used to wire the left/right speakers as center). So now I have the rear speakers wired up as center speakers, cause my laptop doesn't support rear speakers anyways.
Second, the subwoofer needs repair. This happens to be my winter project. I like subwoofers. They make windows shake. Why not buy a new one? The old one was very expensive. How expensive. Well, dad said everything cost about $2500 at the time. (For inflation comparison, a new Acura Integra cost about $12,500 at the time, and yes, thats how old our Integra is, it still drives better than our Mercedes, that's at least 2 years younger). The receiver was about half, the subwoofer was half of the remaining half, and the rest was divided amoung the remaining 4 speakers.
So heres what the subwoofer looks like after I had fun with a screwdriver.
Now whats broken is the driver... which looks like this..
Now if you look at this wiki picture.. you'll notice that the surround is missing.
Well, it pretty much dissolved into a wonderful black power-like substance when I opened the woofer and got all over the carpet. The job of the surround is to absorb the vibrations caused by the diaphragm thumping. Without it, the speaker pretty much makes a rattle sound after every sound.. Subwoofers are very heavy for that very reason, to keep the speaker from vibrating.So I ordered a replacement, and since its holiday season, it won't ship until after I start school. I'll have to finish this project until the next time I come home. I'll update this post when I do finish though.
[update: 1/17]
Well, my mom let me know my parts came in the mail a few days after I got to school. This is my first weekend back since then, since it is a long weekend, and I have nothing better to do (other than physics homework, linear algebra homework, and a computer program to write) I figured, might as well finish this project... so when I'm doing something else I have a subwoofer.
Well, while reading the instructions that came with the parts, I learned that I had to take off another part of the speaker, the gasket (not shown in above picture). It just sits right on top of the outer edge of the surround and holds it down. This thing was a bitch to remove. It's glued down. So I had ot get a knife and stick it between the gasket and the frame and slice the glue. That glue was still sticky, and gooey, and it pretty much stuck onto the knife and made the knife stuck in there if you clean it off the knife. So it was pretty much an half hour process of stab, cut, remove, clean knife. After I got it off, it looked like this:
Notice how the glue and remains of the old surround is still on there. My next hour was spent scrape it off with a cement chisel. Yes. A freaking cement chisel. The flat head screwdriver wasn't sharp enough. Not to mention it took a good amount of arm strength. It made my desk look like this when I was done..
Which I just swept off my desk (with much difficulty cause it kinda stuck to my hand or the desk as I swept across) onto the carpet.. that my mom vacuumed just a few days before. HahaNext I needed to glue on the surround. They provided a wonderful bottle of "booger glue". Here's a picture of it before I explain why I call it booger glue (cause pictures help).
Well, you can tell that the color is very similar to the color of boogers. Yup. It's semi-transparent too. But that's not all. It has the same viscosity of boogers. It's gooey, sticky, and it stretches if you touch it and pull apart. As it dries, it gets thicker and stickier and stretchier... and it's very sticky. Well, they gave me a brush to apply it with. First time I applied it to the diaphragm and stuck the surround on. Then waited for it to dry (for 24+ hours as instructed by the instructions). 24 hours later the brush head was pretty much a rubbery.. thing. It still bended around and stuff, but all the hairs were stuck to each other. I still needed to glue the outer edge of the surround to the frame. It's the exact same process, just a different location. Of course, the instructions knew in advance that the brush would become unusable, so the instructions said, use your finger to smear the glue on. What fun that was. My fingers got stuck to the surround and frame a few times. After the surround was firmly attached to the frame, and the gasket was back on.. I got to deal with this glue on my fingers. But this is what it looked like.
You can even see my crappy glue job on the diaphragm. While it dried I was attempting to wash the boogers glue off my fingers.. not fun. First off, it's kinda waterproof, especially when dried, so water didn't really help. With soap, you could kinda rub it off in small amounts... I swear it took pieces of my skin with it. After most of it came off, I reassembled the subwoofer and gave it a test run.
So it was me and my mom blasting bass-heavy asian music while tinkering with the receiver settings. That was pretty entertaining cause be blasted that music pretty loud. The low notes sound so pretty. It sounds better than my Sony subwoofer, and almost as good as my Bose (it still sounds cleaner). But, at higher volumes, we noticed that our Pioneer speakers couldn't handle high pitched notes, so we lowered the treble/bass on them so they only needed to handle mid notes.. and set them as front speakers instead of center speakers (they're supposed to be rear speakers).
Here's a picture of what my desk looks like. :D
Labled from left to right: Pioneer set as L-front, Infinity set as center, my laptop, other Infinity set as center also, Pioneer set as R-front, then my Infinity subwoofer next to my desk, and my Pioneer receiver above it.
