Audioengine A5 active speaker conversion to passive speaker

[danbee]

The original A5 powered speaker was prone to overheating, which fried many capacitors that are difficult or impossible to replace. Many users have complained about this obvious engineering fault. The speaker itself, though is fine. So, the question is, how to convert the active speaker to passive mode. The answer is that you simply have cut the red and black wires from the speaker terminals, lengthen them a few inches, and solder them in two places on the PC board where the crossover is located. You need to cut a 1/4" hole in the PC board to enable the wires to be fed through for connection to the PC board. The connections are shown in a YouTube video at 8:28 minutes (see attached screenshot). Effectively this means that the speaker output of the required external amplifier is fed to the input of the crossover network via the speaker terminals, the output connections to the woofer and tweeter remain the same.

Dan

 

[dogfonos]

Interesting. I've always suspected that one Audioengine product, the A2+, was a compromised design. Didn't know the old A5 was troublesome. The A5 was far too expensive to purchase this side of the pond so not many UK owners.

Have to say, if you have a spare external amp, this seems like a good idea but if you haven't got an external amp handy, I'd opt to get rid of the speakers and put the money towards a cheap pair of true active speakers which tend to sell for a similar price to a cheap amp.

 

[danbee]

Thanks for your comment, dogfonos. In my case, I was satisfied with the sound quality of the A5 speakers, and didn't want to trash them. Small amplifiers of adequate quality to match these speakers are not expensive on this side of the pond, so that's what I opted to do. Audioengine also makes a small amplifier, but after my experience I've written them off as a supplier.

 

[mikejapan]

Hello Danbee, I’m going to attempt a conversion just like this on a pair of bamboo A5s I bought well over a decade ago. I heard on another forum, the board need not be cut. Any pro tip? I’m anything but a pro!