Hey! Audio amateur here. Got a potentially dumb question here:

Someone donated a KRK Rokit 5 RPG3 speaker and RPG2 speaker to me and I was curious if I can get it to work with my JVC UX-A4 CD/Cassette player.

The JVC outputs via speaker wire or 3.5 mm jack. The speakers take inputs from XLR, TRS, and RCA. On hand, I had a 10ft 3.5 mm male-to-male cable and a 3.5mm-to-TRS adapter, so I tried plugging into the JVC with that, but it sounded very distorted. Maybe the adapter kills a lot of the quality, or the 3.5 mm jack can't drive the speakers enough, or the cable is too long, or something else.

Would an XLR-to-speaker-wire cable provide better results? Or is that usually used for something else?