On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:28:40 -0800, (Dave Platt)
wrote:

I asked before about a monaural amp for my bathroom TV, to use my
cetiling/wall speakers from a 30's record player.

I hadn't been able to find a small amp, under 50 dollars on ebay or
Amazon and that's why I asked here. Amazingly, then I found several
in some other list (I'll try tell you later when I find it again.)

Now I'm ready to buy one but my question is, What size amp would I
need? They ran from 5 watts to 14 watts and more. (The input will
come from he earphone jack on the TV.)

Beware of power ratings... or, at least, know what you're getting
based on how the power rating is given.

It's been common for years to find amps and receivers marketed with
extremely unrealistic power ratings... the classic example being the
kind of amp which advertises "100 watts peak music power" but is
driven from a wall-wart that might deliver 5 watts for a few seconds
before overheating.

LOL. I'll pay attention to that. After I read your post, I noticed
that the Radio Shack amp that gregz recommended said it used 25 watts
input, but each channel had only 1.8 watts RMS. output.

And I presume I can take a stereo amp and connect the sides in
parallel, if I keep polarity the same????

That's a good recipe for a fried amplifier, in many cases. Any
mismatch between the two amplifier sides,

FTR. so even an amp with supposedly identical sides might have some
mismatch that would cause a failure.

*or* between the signals fed
into the two channels

In this case it would be the very same monaural audio output from the
tv, and only a bad solder joint by me could make the two signals
unequal. Might that be enough to damage the amp.

will result in the two sections fighting with
one another... one trying to pull the output voltage up, the other
trying just as hard to pull it down. Each side will look like a dead
short, or worse, to the other.

All it takes is one glitch, and all of the Magic Blue Smoke leaks out.
Unless an amp is specifically designed and advertised as being able to
handle this sort of parallel configuration, don't do it.

Okay.

That being said... it's hard to give you a good answer to your
question without knowing much more about the speakers you are planning
to use,

Two speakers from the 1930's, one 10" and one 6 or 4"

any enclosures,

It's a rectangle about 2 feet by 1 footf set at a 45^ angle to the
ceiling and the wall, and flush against the wall to the left. Open at
t he right. I never got around to putting the side on the
enclosure, because I didn't make provitsions to attach the side in the
first place, and it r equires putting a ladder in the bathtub. And
the sound is good enough.

the volume level you want to run,

Low I guess, because a) the rooom is small: b) the walls are either
sheet rock or tile and there is the toilet, the sink, and the door but
nothing soft like curtains. to absorb the sound, and c) for 25 years
I used to run these speakers right off the earphone jack of the
previous TV, which was a 12" B&W, tube TV** (not just the CRT, but
about 6 or 7 tubes) .

**I paid $2 for it at a yard sale, it was 10 maybe even 20
0 years old then, and it ran for 25 more years without giving any
trouble. It was "instant on" becaue they ran half-wave rectified
current through the filamnts when the TV was off.

the sort of
program material you want to play, etc.

No concerts, just tv sitcoms and dramas, the Evening News (such as it
is.) and Jeopardy.

As a general rule of thumb, I'd guess that an honest 10-watt amplifier
would likely give you as much volume as you'd want in this sort of
application, unless your existing wall/ceiling speakers are extremely
inefficient.

They were typical speakers of the 1930's, but I don't know what that
means. In the 70's I lived in an apartment building with several
women in their 80's. So they had bought these things new, and now
they were moving to what's almost as good as what's now called
assisted living, although smaller, and they had no room for their
radios, especially if part of it was broken. One end-table radio
was from 1930 and it broke in 1940 and hadn't been turned on since
then. She gave it to me in 1980 and I turned it on and it played
beautifully. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get it run since
that first time. (IIRC, I touched a screwdriver blade to a (anode?)
cap on one of the tubes, but that only worked that one time.

Another woman gave me her husband's blackjack. He had been a military
sentry in the Spanish American war. Most of the leather covering had
falled off already, but at the time, before my mother gave me some of
my granparents stuff (pots, a pillow) , it was the oldest thing I
owned.

Thanks, and if you managed to read this far, thanks again!