Round speaker enclosures look great but often cost a fortune. Hacker Roberto got the same effect for much less money by taking a set of IKEA Blanda Matt bowls and gluing them together to build the enclosure -- a trick you could replicate with any reasonably constructed salad bowl. For another take on DIY speakers, check out how to make speakers from paper cups and earbuds.

Blogger Chris Metcalf found himself in an entertainment center-building bind: he couldn't wall-mount his speakers because of the layout of his room, but speaker stands stable enough to withstand the ravages of his cat were way too expensive. Not wanting to spend hundreds on stands, he came up with a practical and inexpensive solution.

The answer came in the form of a pair of Walmart "torchiere lamps", those tall, wide-based lamps that are pretty much ubiquitous in everybody's first apartment. The results were quite impressive, given the materials I started with.

In the end he spent $US26 (plus some elbow grease) on a pair. I'm looking forward to trying this out in my own home, loathe as I am to damage the century old plaster walls. Have your own tricks from the DIY-home-theatre trade? Share them in the comments below.

Popular Mechanics illustrates step-by-step how to build your own home speakers from start to finish. The author starts with a speaker kit that costs $369 for a pair, which sounds expensive until the author suggests that the results sound better than $500 speaker sets. (Okay, even after hearing that it still sounds expensive.) Overall it's a pretty ambitious DIYproject. Luckily Popular Science details the entire thing with tons of helpful start-to-finish photos. If you've ever tackled a similar speaker project, let's hear about it (including whether it was worth it) in the comments.

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Earlier today we showed you how to kill your mobile phone speaker buzz by applying small metal sleeves to your speaker wires. If that's not an option for you (say you've got built-in speakers), one iPhone user has built an iPhone anti-radio interference shield—which is a fancy way of saying "sliced open can of Red Bull." In a nutshell, the author opened up an empty Red Bull and taped it to the back of an iPhone dock. The result: about 180 degrees of interference-free air. Anything in front of the shield is still susceptible to buzz, but according to the author the Red Bull shield does the trick for anything behind the shield. If you give it a try, let's hear how it works out in the comments.

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Update: Several readers point out the ferrite beads are not necessarily magnets—just hunks of iron. Our apologies! Do your speakers buzz and crackle whenever a new text message or call is about to come in on your nearby phone? What has come to be known as "GSM Buzz" happens because the wire in poorly shielded speakers acts as an antenna for the frequency the phone operates on. Rather than shell out a lot of money for better shielded speakers, you cancel out the speaker buzz with pieces of metal—the tube-shaped ferrite beads commonly found on USB cables. Harvest them from the round block at the end of an old USB cable with a pair of scissors, or just buy a few on the cheap from an electronic supply store. Tape the ferrite bead to the cable of the offending speaker, and the magnet should provide enough passive frequency suppression to do away with the horrible buzzing and popping.

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Our pals at Gizmodo pointed us to a kit you can buy which turns the plastic case that new iPod Nano's come in into a nice looking speaker kit. Kudos to Bird Electron, the Japanese website selling the kit (sorry, I don't know if they ship overseas, I can't read Japanese) for this hack. Way to reduce landfill and come up with a cool gadget. :)

It could be a lack of caffeine making me woozy, but I reckon if you check out the photo on the website selling these babies, the speaker looks a little like a white ORLY owl with big manga eyes. If you're the kind of person who anthropomorphises speakers that is. Not that I'd ever do that.

Bird Electron [via Gizmodo]