I've had the Logitech Z-5500 for over 7 years and it has been my pride and joy. Recently it died, I'm not entirely sure what's to blame whether it's the head unit or something inside the box, but it certainly isn't a fuse job anymore. I inspected the insides and nothing seemed to be fried in either the box or the head unit. I'm assuming it's the control pod because of a known heating issue I read about it having. I hope that with the power amps being analogue and more robust that they should still be functioning although I have no way of testing this yet as the connection to them is some composite pin thing that went to the pod. A few months back I also cooked the systems original sub with DC clips, I replaced it with a car sub which was $350 I got an Alpine Type SWS 1043D with dual 4ohm voice coils to get the 8 ohm load for the 188Watt RMS Logitech Amp, the sub works very well in the Logitech sub enclosure as it has the ideal Vas parameters for the Alpine Sub, although it would be nice to make use of the Alpines 350Watt RMS handling capacity. The Satellites are the originals between 60-70 watts RMS at 8ohms I think. The entire system was $600 new. I still want to get the use out of the speakers especially the sub. I know I can manually wire into the active power amps in the back of the sub and use that to drive the speakers, although to do that properly I have to get a special cable off EBay to work with the pin connection. This is the cable that seems to be the only decent one. www.ebay.com/itm/Logitech-Z-5500-Speakers-Replacement-Control-Pod-Post636-Subwoofer-Wired-Remote-/321069120064?pt=US_Audio_Cables_Adapters&hash=item4ac135fa40 I thought I could also use a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi External Sound Card Particularly this one www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=9393809 as a new head unit seeing as it also comes with a remote and a manual volume knob. I don't want to control my entire 500 watt system with the windows sound volume control or the tiny knob on the EBay unit lol. Using the above equipment would probably end out being around $200 and it might not work. But then like I said earlier I'm not sure yet if it actually is the pod, it could be the onboard power amps. so I had a look through trade me and came across an old Sony HTDDW7000 Head unit power amp combo thing which I might be able to get here in Wanganui, it can drive in 7.2 that's 200 Watts RMS X2 for the subs and 185 watts RMS for the satellites all at 6ohms. I see that as being a better alternative as I could expand with that in the future which is what I want although all my current drivers are 8ohms so I'd lose some volume. I also had a look at new Home Theater Amps but most of them are measly and will only output roughly 90watts RMS into all drivers and that isn't enough. I don't want to go pro or spend excessive amounts of money. All of the alternate Logitech Systems are terrible. I was also thinking of getting some Digi-Key Class D power amps and running them from the creative external sound card using that as the pre amp, the amps are quite cheap and give out a decent amount of power which would work well with these speakers. I would consider an entire system upgrade as a last resort. I've had a look at systems around 1k+ but they all have 8' subs with less than 200 Watts RMS, you have to spend a lot more to get a 10'. The Z-5500 was like no other when it came to bang for your buck. I'm not too sure what to go for, basically I listen to a very wide variety of music, watch movies, play games and even do some audio editing and fruity loops. I like a clean refined sound that's bright but I do like some punchy bass and extreme engulfing lows every now and thenDoes anyone have any ideas or had experience with the Z-5500 that could give some suggestions? Apparently the links to the parts are not allowed to show up :(
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