Bell and Howell 3592 speaker amp advice

[John Fedko]

I’ve got a Bell and Howell 3592 - one 1/4 8 ohm speaker output - I’ve got two passive 8 ohm speakers with 1/4 inputs and outputs to connect to each other . Can someone recommend an an inexpensive amp to make the system the best in can be ? Thank you

[Janice Glesser]

Hi John... Steve Klare is probably a better source for amp information, however he did help me set up my sound system for my Elmo 16 CL projector. I don't use an external amplifier I just take the output from the projector and pass that into a small mixer. This way I can output the mono signal to both the left and right channels to simulate stereo. I then output from the mixer into a sound bar that has a subwoofer. I use some adapter plugs to accommodate the different input plugs. I also have my digital projector feed through the same mixer. I use an alternating switch to control the input either film or digital.

My sound is great. No one ever complains.

[John Fedko]

Awesome - what is the mixer - I did just use a 1/4 plug to rca plug adapter and just inserted the rca into my stereo receiver aux input that has front and rear speakers . It works well for my indoor theater . But i want to be able to drive two passive 8 ohm speakers for outside backyard theater ! Thanks John

[John Fedko]

Hope Steve can give me advice ! I’ve also got a Sankyo 800 Super 8 stereo hooked up to receiver aux input and the sound is Amazing . It’s good for Elmo 1200d Super 8 also hooked to aux input receiver but not as good as Sankyo 800 - maybe Steve can help with improving Elmo 1200 sound which is coming off mini plug adapter to rca plugs into receiver !

[Janice Glesser]

John, when I used to do outdoor screenings I used a couple of small guitar amplifiers for the speaker system. I fed the output of the projector into a direct box then to the amplifiers.

[John Fedko]

Thanks Janice - right now I am going straight from 8 ohm speaker out on projector to aux input on my receiver . Should I be using a direct box first to go from projector speaker out ???? Or is it ok to just straight into receiver and /or amp from projector speaker out ?

[John Fedko]

Also - I have two big 8 ohm unpowered passive speakers I need to drive ! Should I just use an amplifier or do I need a “direct box” first !!! Thank you

[John Fedko]

Janice - you’re my hero so I picked up a direct box on Amazon ! I’m going to go from projector speaker output to direct box / then out of direct box to an amp using 1/4 plug to rca plug adapter . Then out of amp to two 8 ohm passive unpowered speakers !!!!! Thanks for your help and I’ll update the results after the Amazon deliveries !!!

[Janice Glesser]

Sounds good John... That's what I would have suggested. I got tied up yesterday with my middle grandson's graduation from high school and I took him and my family out to dinner. I think you're sound system set up will work just fine. Let us know how it goes.

[Steve Klare]

Oh my goodness, Janice! You flatter me!

-this just happens to be something I'm good at! (-among quite a few things I'm not!)

If this was about tying a neck-tie, folding laundry, or sports trivia, I would remain strangely silent! (The jury's still out on cutting the lawn! I think I do a time-efficient, overall good job, but my wife takes away a lot of points for attention to detail!)

John, there is simply no graceful way to directly hook up two 8 Ohm speakers to a single 8 Ohm amplifier output: either you lose half the potential power or risk overheating the amplifier.

You do need an external amp in between. The nice thing here is you can let a modern, off the shelf amplifier do the heavy lifting. It will keep the old, hard to repair internal amplifier nice and cool for an extended life and put the burden on something else that's basically disposable when it fails.

I do the connection in-between a little differently (-that's OK, whatever works!).

My 16mm machine has no Aux out, so I kind-of made a fake one:

Line Level Audio Output From a Kodak Pageant

This takes the speaker level signal from the 16mm machine and divides it down to line level so I can plug it into my mixer. It would work with an amplifier input too, it's just the connections would need to change.

Decent speakers and basic controls like treble and bass can really improve audio quality. I have a second screen in a different part of the house and decided to move 16mm there for the summer and operate through the machine's own speaker. Based on the sound alone, I brought it upstairs to rejoin Super-8 and video projection about a week later!

The mixer is a nice thing to have if you are running multiple machines and need to select which audio goes out to the amplifier. I usually have two channels of Super-8, one of video projection and one of 16mm, so directly switching cables among these could get really ugly. In my setup, it's like an central audio control panel.

Adding an Audio Mixer Panel

If you are running just one machine, it would be unnecessary.

[John Fedko]

Steve you’re the best ! Thanks for chiming in - now that I’ve got you - the wizard of audio - in attendance - I have a situation I would like your opinion on . My Sankyo 800 stereo Super 8 sounds sensational through my receiver aux and five speaker system BUT at loud levels I can faintly hear the clicking of the film going through the system in my speakers !!! Is there a solution or is this just a Sankyo 800 quirk since my Elmo 1200d Does NOT produce this noise at high levels .

[Steve Klare]

Hi John,

That's really more of a Super-8 quirk.

Back when Kodak was establishing the specs for the new Super-8 format, they chose 18 frames of separation between the audio and the picture. The intention was to eventually have magnetic sound cartridges for sound home movies. Whether for the geometry of the camera and cartridge or because the larger the separation between the picture and audio, the more seconds of mismatched sound that would result when somebody cut and spliced footage at home, they decided to keep this difference as tight as possible, so 18 frames it was.

The thing is other sound formats (16mm and Regular-8 as examples) use something like 54 frames of separation. The film in the gate moves in bursts: move, stop and show the frame, move again to get a steady image on screen. The film past the soundhead flows smoothly for steady audio quality. Those 54 frames the other formats have represent a lot more distance that can be used to smooth all this pulsation out. 18 frames is adequate, most of the time, but here and there the vibration of the film in the gate sneaks through to the sound head and you get chatter on the audio.

Some of the more premium S8 machines deal with this better than others, but it's kind of a fact of life!

(It's like marrying somebody with an irritating laugh! If you love them for everything else, you just learn to accept it!)

[John Fedko]

Great explanation ! Thank you and I’ll learn to live with it !!!!

[Steve Klare]

It's interesting that you experience it more through an external audio system: I had the exact same experience.

I think it's always there to a greater or lesser extent, but when it's coming out of the machine's internal speaker, it's easier for the machine's natural mechanical chatter to mask it. (-like trying to see a red rose stuck on a red wall, or hear one violin in an orchestra...)

Then you (-and I) start separating the chatter from the machine by putting it in a distant speaker where it's not coming from the same source and our directional hearing can recognize two different sounds. (This could be a factor against listening to super-8 on headphones.)

Even if we did manage to kill it locally, it could wind up being kind of baked-in to many commercial prints. Some, like Derann, recorded audio on dedicated recording machines with no projection capacity: smooth film flow past the recording head and no chatter. Others recorded on projectors. As I remember it, Blackhawk had a recording area with a 16mm machine to hold the sound master and a group of Eumig S8 machines around the table to record this audio on the stripes of prints of the same film. (How they got all this to stay in sync, I have no idea!).

Film recorded on a projector should be just as vulnerable to chatter as film played back on a machine. (-unless maybe they declawed the Eumigs?!)

[Brian Fretwell]

I believe Derann's Magnatech recording machines ran at 4 times projection speed too.