My in laws gifted my kid this pretty cool RC car but it makes this awful music that’s REALLY loud. Can I wire a resistor in series on one of the speaker legs to turn the volume down, say 50%?
Sure, you could also use a potentiometer to give it a volume control dial
See, the problem with doing this is that the kid will just turn it back up all the way. I think what you'd actually want here is a voltage divider, right? Just putting a resistor in series is going to distort the already crappy audio quality even more which is going to make it sound even worse, just not as loud.
Isn't it multiple parallel resistors in series? Shit, am I forgetting everything from my EE classes a decade ago?
Remember that voltage divides between series elements (Kirchoff's Voltage Law) while current divides between parallel ones (Kirchoff's Current Law). A voltage divider is literally as simple as two resistors in series, each having a voltage across it proportional to its own resistance divided by the total resistance.
I thought a voltage divider is 1 resistor in series and another in parallel? That way you have 2 resistors in series while the component in question sources it's voltage from in between the 2 resistors, dividing the voltage based on the proportion of the resistances of the 2 resistors. Kinda like dividing up a waterfall into 2 waterfalls of separate height that add up to the same total as the original waterfall, and then putting a turbine going from between the waterfalls to the bottom so you only get the lower waterfall's portion of the energy compared to the original waterfall's full height.
The component in question, in this case the speaker, can be treated as the second resistor.
It’s perfect, got it down i would say around 40%. It’s still loud but no longer loud in the adjacent room, and ofc now it’s adjustable. Can’t stress how big of a quality of life improvement this represents
Yes, but it might be easier to stick a gum on the membrane? Or is it a small tweeter?
Yeah, the easy parenting hack for noisy toys is a piece of tape over the speaker. Doesn’t always work, but it won’t cost you much to find out.
Yep, would work exact like you imagine it would. The other commenter saying potentiometer is right. You don't know what resistance will give you the volume you want, so save the time of doing it two or three times and just get the potentiometer front the start.
