A Little Audio

This is not "high" tech, but finding a solution took a little while.  The AA6E station, for today's purpose, consists of a Windows 10 PC (the Intel NUC), a FlexRadio Flex-6500, and two compact bookshelf loudspeakers.

The usual solution these days for audio setups is to use "powered speakers" for computer audio and possibly for transceiver audio.  But these have problems for me:

1. For HF Amateur Radio, powered speakers generally are too sensitive to the RF environment and require ferrite suppression.
2. Powered speakers generally only offer a few feet of cabling between speakers, which is fine for your desktop but not so good if you want to fill a room with audio.
3. It's awkward to support independent speaker systems for the radio and for the computer.  They take up space, and they make for lots of cabling.
4. Higher end powered speakers do a fair job with audio fidelity, but not as good as good conventional speaker components.

In my case, I'm starting with these nice inherited speakers (thanks to son Eric!) and I'm working backward.  You need a basic audio amplifier.  These aren't as common as they once were.  There are some interesting very cheap "Class D" switching amplifiers.  I tried one (the Lepy LP-2020A).  It did OK with the audio, but it lacked multiple inputs, and, worse, it produced very strong VHF emissions that wiped out 2 meters for me, even after adding chokes.

I sat on this project for a while, until I ran across a family of simple audio amplifiers by AudioSource.  They offer the AMP100VS, which gives 50 W per stereo channel.  That's more than I need, but you only live once.  Amazon has it for $110.

The system (diagrammed above) provides several unexpected features:

• Auto On-Off.  The amp can be set to power on whenever an audio input signal appears.  There's about a 3 second delay for turn-on.  Power shuts down after 5 minutes with no input. This feature saves us having to provide switched AC power. In the standby mode, the amp draws 8 W from the line, compared to about 17 W for power on idling. You can argue whether that's a worthwhile saving! (Power can alternatively be controlled by a 12 V DC signal.)
• Audio Interrupt.  This amp is apparently designed for the commercial public address market, where you might have background music that is occasionally interrupted by "Attention K-Mart Shoppers".  In my case, it is convenient to allow the radio's output to interrupt the computer's output, so I don't need an audio switch or mixer.

This is low tech, as promised, but it sounds fine and solves a knotty little problem.