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Category Archives: digital audio hacks
Those Voices in Your Head Might be Lasers
What if I told you that you can get rid of your headphones and still listen to music privately, just by shooting lasers at your ears?
The trick here is something called the photoacoustic effect. When certain materials absorb light — or any electromagnetic radiation — that is either pulsed or modulated in intensity, the material will give off a sound. Sometimes not much of a sound, but a sound. This effect is useful for spectroscopy, biomedical imaging, and the study of photosynthesis. MIT researchers are using this effect to beam sound directly into people’s ears. It could lead to …read more
Posted in digital audio hacks, Hackaday Columns, laser, laser hacks, mit, news, photoacoustic, photoacoustics, sound
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Raspberry Pi Jukebox Hits All the Right Notes
We (and by extension, you) have seen the Raspberry Pi crammed into nearly every piece of gear imaginable. Putting one inside a game console is to popular it’s bordering on a meme, and putting them into old stereos and other pieces of consumer electronics isn’t far behind. It’s always interesting to see how hackers graft the modern Raspberry Pi into the original hardware, but we’ll admit it can get a bit repetitive. So how about somebody scratch building an enclosure for their jukebox project?
[ComfortablyNumb] took the road less traveled when he created this very nice wooden Raspberry Pi enclosure …read more
Posted in digital audio hacks, jukebox, musical hacks, Raspberry Pi, stain, varnish, waveshare, woodworking
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Freeforming the Atari Punk Console
This stunning piece of art is [Emily Velasco’s] take on the Atari Punk Console. It’s a freeform circuit that synthesizes sound using 555 timers. The circuit has been around for a long time, but her fabrication is completely new and simply incredible!
This isn’t [Emily’s] first rodeo. She previously built the mini CRT sculpture project seen to the left in the image above. Its centerpiece is a tiny CRT from an old video camera viewfinder, and it is fairly common for the driver circuit to understand composite video. And unlike CRTs, small video cameras with composite video output are easily …read more
Posted in 555, 555 audio, 555 timer, 555 timer IC, atari punk console, blinking led, blinkingled, camcorder, camcorder viewfinder, Circuit Sculpture, contest, contests, crt, crt hacks, digital audio hacks, flickering led, led, led hacks, miniature CRT, musical hacks, photocell, video hacks
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Battery Swap Keeps Sansa Clip+ Chugging
You’d be forgiven for not realizing there’s still a diehard group of people out there carrying around dedicated MP3 players. While they were all the rage a decade or so back, most consumers have since moved over to using their handy dandy pocket supercomputer for playing their music. Plus controlling every other aspect of their personal life and finances, of course. Though that’s another story entirely.
But as [Conno Brooks] explained to us, there’s a sizable group of open source fanatics who prefer to store their jams on devices running the Rockbox firmware. Only problem is, some of the desirable …read more
Posted in battery, battery swap, classic hacks, digital audio hacks, Rockbox, sansa clip
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A Graphic Equaliser The Analogue Way
There was a time when any hi-fi worth its salt had a little row of sliders on its front panel, a graphic equalizer. On a hi-fi these arrays of variable gain notch filters were little more than a fancy version of a tone control, but in professional audio and PA systems they are used with many more bands to precisely equalise a venue and remove any unwanted resonances.
On modern hi-fi the task is performed in software, but [Grant Giesbrecht] wanted an analogue equalizer more in the scheme of those fancy tone controls than the professional devices. His …read more
Posted in digital audio hacks, eq, graphic eq, graphic equalizer
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Voice Controlled Stereo Balance With ESP8266
A stereo setup assumes that the listener is physically located between the speakers, that’s how it can deliver sound equally from both sides. It’s also why the receiver has a “Balance” adjustment, so the listener can virtually move the center point of the audio by changing the relative volume of the speakers. You should set your speaker balance so that your normal sitting location is centered, but of course you might not always be in that same position every time you listen to music or watch something.
[Vije Miller] writes in with his unique solution to the problem of the …read more
Knock-Off AirPods Merged into Bluetooth Receiver
Whether or not you personally like the concept of the AirPod Bluetooth headphones is irrelevant, as an Apple product one thing is certain: all the cool kids want them. That also means that plenty of overseas manufacturers are pumping out janky clones for a fraction of the price for those who are more about the Apple look than the Apple price tag. Are they any good? No, of course not. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do something interesting with them.
[Igor Kromin] took apart a pair of fake AirPods and was predictably underwhelmed. So much so that he didn’t …read more
Posted in audio, bluetooth, Cellphone Hacks, digital audio hacks
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Empty Can Upcycled Into Portable Speaker
We aren’t suggesting you go digging through the trash looking for empty cans, there’s a word for people who do that, and it isn’t “hacker”. But if you’ve already got some empty cans in the privacy of your own home, you could certainly do worse than turning them into unique enclosures for your electronics projects. Better than sitting in the landfill, surely.
This hack from [Robin Hartley] turns an empty Cadbury hot chocolate can into a portable speaker that’s sure to get some attention. But don’t be fooled: a surprisingly amount of engineering went into this project in the form …read more
Posted in digital audio hacks, portable speaker, trash, upcycle
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Making A Vintage 1990s Sound Board Do Rapid Fire Silently
Sometimes a mix of old and new is better than either the old or new alone. That’s what [Brad Carter] learned when he was given an old 1990s sound board with a noisy SCSI drive in it. In case you don’t know what a sound board is, think of a bunch of buttons laid out in front of you, each of which plays a different sound effect. It’s one way that radio DJ’s and podcasters intersperse their patter with doorbells and car crash sounds.
Before getting the sound board, [Brad] used a modern touchscreen table but it wasn’t responsive enough …read more
Posted in digital audio hacks, scsi, SCSI Emulator, SCSI2SD, sd card, sound board
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Cross-Correlation Makes Quick Work Of Ads
Once relegated to the proverbial Linux loving Firefox user, ad blocking has moved into public view among increased awareness of privacy and the mechanisms of advertising on the internet. At the annual family gathering, when That Relative asks how to setup their new laptop, we struggle through a dissertation on the value of ad blockers and convince them to install one. But what about mediums besides the internet? Decades ago Tivo gave us one button to jump through recorded TV. How about the radio? If available, satellite radio may be free of The Hated Advertisement. But terrestrial radio and online …read more