How to Make Any Speaker Bluetooth Powered

Today I updated an old speaker end table to work as a Bluetooth speaker for our sunroom.

My wife’s grandma was getting rid of an old stereo end table so naturally I took it. It has a 1/4 inch audio jack on the back and a 12 inch speaker on the inside. I figured this would be the perfect thing to add a bluetooth amplifier board to listen to music in our sunroom.

I didn’t do a ton of research on what boards are out there, but I knew that I didn’t want one that had buttons on it for volume and pairing and other settings. Since I was going to tuck this away inside the cabinet I didn’t want to have to worry about getting to buttons later.

So I found this unit on Amazon for $11.

Then I took the back panel off of the cabinet and wired in the board. First I drilled a hole in the bottom of the cabinet to run the power cable through. Next I soldered some new speaker cable to the speaker inside since what was in there was pretty crusty, and the insulation was all peeling off.

Now since this board is stereo, meaning it has a right and left speaker output but I only have one speaker, I had to get creative with the wiring. I plugged my one speaker into the Left + and Right – terminals on the board. This combines the left and right signal of the amplifier so that you don’t loose the left or right audio.

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Now some stereo amplifiers can operate in bridge mode, which allows you to use the full wattage of the amplifier with only a mono speaker. With the method I used there is technically half the power of the amp that is not being used, but at least I am not losing half the stereo signal.

Make sure to check out the video related to this project: