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%?

    • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]MEnglish
      5•5 months ago

      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.

          • buckykat [none/use name]English
            5•5 months 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.

        • @BakedCatboy@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1•5 months ago

          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.