speakers
Make Invisible Speakers By Sacrificing Six Books
10:00AM Adam Pash | Tired of speakers that stand out on your bookshelf? Solve the problem by sacrificing a few books to turn an old pair of speakers into some that will fit right in next to your copy of Upgrade Your Life. More »
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Create Simple Wall Mounts For Your Speakers
5:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Wall mount your speakers for cheap with this easy DIY project and spend your cash on something your ears can appreciate.A cursory internet search shows that basic speaker mounts can start at $20 a piece for little more than a plastic bracket. Chris Job, a user at the DIY website Curbly, found it much more economical to create his own mounts. Whether for your new 5.1 surround sound system, your cramped media room, or when just wiring your home to fill it with music, it’s best to get speakers off the ground, furniture, and other resonant surfaces, and up to ear level. And since non-powered speakers are actually not heavy at all, with less than $2.00 in materials and an hour of work, it’s surprisingly simple to create custom brackets for mounting them on walls and ceilings. As long as you have some basic hand tools available like a drill and saw you too can whip up enough sturdy mounts for less than you’d spend on a single store-bought plastic mount. If you don’t want wires dangling down your walls and you’re not about to punch holes in the walls and fish speaker wires into the crawlspace, don’t despair. We’ve covered several DIY speaker stand projects before like how to repurpose cheap floor lamps into speaker stands and DIY cinder block speaker stands. DIY Speaker Wall Mounts [via Make] More »
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10:30AM Angus Kidman | 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.
HiFi Wigwam [via IKEA Hacker]
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DIY IKEA Salad Bowl Speaker Enclosures
10:30AM Angus Kidman | 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.
HiFi Wigwam [via IKEA Hacker]
More »
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Repurpose Cheap Floor Lamps Into Speaker Stands
7:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | 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. How-To: Dirt-Cheap Speaker Stands [via Make] More »
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Build Your Own Speakers
11:00AM Adam Pash | 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. How to Build Your Own Speakers: Step-by-Step DIY Tech [Popular Mechanics] More »
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DIY Red Bull Anti-Radio Interference Shield
8:00AM Adam Pash | 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. Stop the buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz. [via TUAW] More »
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Magnets Kill the Mobile Phone Speaker Buzz
9:00PM Lifehacker US Edition | 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. iPhone Buzz Kill [Mac Life] More »
Turn your iPod Nano case into a Speaker Kit
8:43AM Sarah Stokely | 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] More » 