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I work at a shack in michigan and one of my coworkers is a keyboard player in a band and he picked up a cheap keyboard and organ a few months ago so we took an 1/8inch to bare wire cable radioshack carries. then we cut off the leads to the speakers and soldered the cable on to make a very easy out put witch is good to record to a computer or anything…a great idea for small bands with anything you need to record
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You just need to be careful with your volume on the keyboard. The wires going to the speaker are amplified, which for a basic keyboard could be up to several watts. A line level input on a computer is expecting to see something around .25 V p-p, if I recall correctly, and mic level is about 1/10th that. With an amplified output like that, you could very easily fry the input on your computer’s sound card if you inadvertently turned the volume up to high. In addition, you’ll find that if you turn it much over minimum, you’ll likely get a lot of distortion in the sound as well.
You should add a 10 ohm resistor in place of the speaker. When you turn the keyboard on, voltage from its output amp normally charges a DC blocking capacitor through the speaker. This normally happens in a short time since the speaker has a low resistance. But without that load, it may be feeding the voltage for a longer time into your soundcard input, which isn’t meant to have more than a few Volts peak to peak into the Line input.