Six foot speaker shakes buildings to their foundation

March 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In the first scene of Back to the Future, [Marty McFly] visits the unoccupied laboratory of [Doc Brown]. Seeing an 8-foot-tall speaker connected to a huge array of amplifiers, [Marty] immediately turns on the amps, plugs in an electric guitar, and promptly destroys the amps and speaker while being thrown across the room. This scene must have been a huge inspiration to [Dan] and [Kyle]; they decided to replicate this gigantic speaker for the 2011 UW-Madison  Engineering Expo.

A speaker is a remarkably simple device – they’re usually just a coil of wire, a set of magnets on an iron frame, and a cone. [Dan] and [Kyle] wound hundreds of feet of copper wire around a fiberglass frame for the voice coil, used 8 and 10-inch steel pipe to secure the magnets, and pop riveted two sheets of polycarbonate together to form the cone. The result is a six-foot-diameter speaker in an 8x8x2 foot enclosure.

A speaker this size is only good for one thing: a ton of bass. The speaker can reliably reproduce frequencies from 5 Hz to 50 Hz, frequencies that are better felt than heard. There’s a video of the speaker in action after the break, but we’re pretty sure the best way to experience this insane device is in person.

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SpeechJammer puts an end to annoying speakers

March 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve ever had to deal with people disturbing your peace and quiet by yammering on with their cell phones, you might be interested in the SpeechJammer.

The idea behind the SpeechJammer is fairly simple: It’s very hard to speak if your words are recorded and played back to you a fraction of a second later. This is a real psychological phenomenon known as delayed audio feedback that also has a beneficial effect on stuttering.

According to the researcher’s writeup (PDF warning), the SpeechJammer works by measuring the distance to the ‘target’ with an ultrasonic distance sensor and records the speaker’s voice with a shotgun mic. The recording of the spearker’s voice is delayed for about a fifth of a second and then played on a speaker on the front of the gun.

The researchers tested two conditions: ‘reading news aloud’ and a ”spontaneous monologue.’ Subjects who were reading news aloud had their speech jammed more often than those with the monologue, but the results look fairly promising. There’s only one video of the SpeechJammer in action (available after the break), so we’d like to see a few Hackaday readers build their own ‘shut up gun’ and send in a demo with an annoying talker to validate the results.

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Fill in the bass on your PSP

February 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Michael Chen] felt the sound his PSP was putting out needed more dimension. Some would have grabbed themselves a nice set of headphones, but he grabbed his soldering iron instead and found some space where he could add a bigger speaker.

Mobile devices tend to cram as much into the small form factor as possible so we’re surprised he managed make room. But apparently if you cut away a bit from the inside of the case there is space beneath the memory card. [Michael] cautions that you need to choose a speaker rated for 8 ohms or greater  in order to use it as a drop-in replacement for one of the two original speakers. But he also touches on a method to use both stock speakers as well as the new one. He suggests grabbing an LM386 op-amp and a capacitor and hooking them up. Yep, there’s room for that too if you mount it dead-bug-style. We wonder how the battery life will be affected by this hack?

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