Clever uses for a receiver

November 5, 2004 5:12 PM

What to do with a Receiver? Someone in my building left a decent Pioneer receiver near the dumpster, obviously hoping that someone would put it to good use. I believe I might be that person, but am not sure what to do with it. I've already got a reliable radio that I enjoy listening to, my record player has it's own pre-amp, and I don't feel a need to add surround sound to the TV (in part because it would mean buying a mess of speakers). But I'm betting someone out there in MeFi land has a clever and novel idea for how it might be employed.

If no suitable use for it can be found, I plan on donating it to the Howard Brown Health Center - no reason for it to go to landfill.

posted by aladfar to Technology (11 answers total)

eBay
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 6:16 PM on November 5, 2004

Circuit bending
posted by Jimbob at 6:47 PM on November 5, 2004

Put it on the computer?
posted by zsazsa at 7:12 PM on November 5, 2004

Build a subwoofer, use this receiver to power it.
posted by shepd at 8:40 PM on November 5, 2004

just ebay it man
posted by ac at 7:34 AM on November 6, 2004

I'll take it.
posted by TurkishGolds at 10:04 AM on November 6, 2004

I had to go out and buy one recently. I inherited some pretty powerful speakers, made int he 80s, and needed a way to drive them. I don't really make room in my house for oversized stereo equipment anymore. It's mostly MP3-walkman-plugged-into-sattellite-speakers and such, but the amp/tower speakers setup was really nice out at Burning Man. You might want to throw it in the basement until the next time you throw a party or something. But it's not much use without components to plug into it and speakers.
posted by scarabic at 10:18 AM on November 6, 2004

If you attach some RCA cable to it such that one end is a mini audio plug and the other splits into L-R speaker connections (all available at Radio Shack for a little bit of nothing) then download something like Darwin Streaming Server to an old pc/mac, then connect all that stuff up, you could make your own personal streaming server of a favorite radio station. For what that's worth. :>
posted by littlegreenlights at 9:21 PM on November 6, 2004

Oh, yeah, you'd need to encode the stream, too, but that's also fairly trivial--Quicktime or Windows Media encoder or whatever.
posted by littlegreenlights at 9:23 PM on November 6, 2004

Make a radio tivo that streams into your pc.
posted by mecran01 at 9:28 AM on November 7, 2004

> Put it on the computer?

Second that. Sound card stereo out to receiver AUX in, then a couple of decent speakers that match the receiver's (conservative) power rating, and next time you play Quake the folks in the next county will know it. Most made-for-computer speakers would embarrass a talking coke machine.
posted by jfuller at 10:50 AM on November 7, 2004