The amplifier is installed inside one of the speakers (called “master”), being the speaker where you need to install the power cord and the cable coming from your PC or audio device (iPod, portable CD player, etc).  This speaker uses two RCA jacks and the product comes with the appropriate cable with one 3.5 mm plug at one end and two RCA plugs at the other hand. On this speaker you will also find the on/off switch, the volume knob and two tone knobs (bass and treble).

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Figure 4: Rear view from the “master” speaker.

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Figure 5: Volume, treble and bass knobs.

One interesting thing about this speaker set is that it uses two cables for connecting the “slave” speaker to the amplifier on the “master” speaker, one for making the woofer connection and another for making the tweeter connection. This is one aspect that differentiates high-end speakers from mainstream ones. A more in-depth explanation is necessary here.

On mainstream speakers only one cable is used to make this connection because there is just one amplifier covering the whole frequency spectrum for each channel. If the speaker has more than one loudspeaker – for example, one woofer and one tweeter – then each speaker must do the frequency separation (i.e. filtering bass sounds and sending them the woofer and filtering treble sounds and sending them to the tweeter) by itself, usually using passive components (coils and capacitors).

On Swans D1080MKII there are separated amplifiers for the woofers and tweeters, meaning that each speaker gets the sound already separated. This is the best configuration possible.

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Figure 6: Rear view from the “slave” speaker, see how it uses separated cables for the woofer and for the tweeter.