New (External) Speakers
Tuesday July 29, 2025
I’ve been playing a lot of Cosmic Smash recently. The bass-heavy music featured in that game makes my blown out, crackling speakers impossible to ignore. I have heard that replacing Blast City speakers is a pain, so getting into that has been on my “worry about it later” list since day one. I realized that I could skip the hassle of replacing the speakers by using external speakers, solidifying the real repair on the “worry about it later” list.
Maybe that’s kind of a wack solution, but I had a vision. I figured decent external speakers could sound a lot better than the stock Blast speakers. I wanted to make little shelves to put the speakers on, and having more shelf space out here would be nice. I ended up buying used (red) Audioengine A2+ speakers on eBay. I was concered that they’d be way too small to sound good. I know that small speakers generally sound worse than larger speakers, but the spot between the Astro and the Blast is pretty tight. Also, literally anything would sound nicer than the speakers I’ve been using.
I built the shelves before the speakers arrived because I was very eager to get started.
Setup went smoothly, as it should’ve. This really isn’t that complicated, but I was still expecting something to go wrong. The NAOMI and MiSTercade both do audio out via RCA, so it was as simple as plugging the speakers in and turning them on. The shelves are a bit too small, but that’s what I get for making them before having the speakers in hand. I also should’ve put them slightly lower, since the left speaker is barely covering part of the picture frame behind it. I’ll be more patient next time.
After setting them up, I realized there was no need for concern. These little things sound great- 100x better than my old rotted Blast City speakers. The general opinion of these speakers online seems to be that they’re good, but they really need the help of a subwoofer. That is probably true if you’re using these to play your music library, but these are more than enough for arcade games. I may end up getting a subwoofer just for fun, assuming I can find one for cheap from a thrift shop or something.
Update: I got a subwoofer
Shout out to Jon from work for setting my cheap ass up with a free subwoofer. I owe him lunch, or something. It is overkill. I will keep it hooked up to the Blast for now, but this thing would be much more appreciated if it was hooked up to my TV.