MP3 Speakers Build

[Tavarin]

So I recently pulled an old broken laptop out of it's storage in my closet and decided to dissect it and take whats valuable. Of course I lifted the hard drive, the RAM, the DVD drive, and the CPU. I also decided to take the speakers.

So I asked myself, what do you get with a pair of laptop speakers, and a pair of headphones? And it came to me; Some portable speakers for my Zune.

And I set to work:

Here are the speakers that I got off the old laptop:

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o234/TM20203/DSC00479.jpg
They're some pretty good speakers so they'll work well for this quick project.

My first task of this project was to remove the male parts of the speaker connectors from the motherboard:

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o234/TM20203/DSC00480.jpg
Of course I did this with a screwdriver. How else would you get them off?

The next step was to test out the stripped wires from the headphones to find out which wire was the power, and which the audio. I have no images of this, but it was a very frustrating test.

Then I soldered the wires onto their new male part:

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o234/TM20203/DSC00482.jpg
The picture is really bad quality. I took it with my cell phone, which sucks at taking pictures close up. But as you can see there is a small male part with a wire sticking out of it.

I did that for both speakers:

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o234/TM20203/DSC00483.jpg
I ruined the male part for one of the speakers and had to get another one off the board. It was much larger and needed a huge wad of tape to keep it together.

Well both speakers are now working, and so I made a quick plastic base to super glue them to and stuck all the wires together with electrical tape:

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o234/TM20203/DSC00484.jpg
I really need to get a cable sleeve for the wire, but that can wait.

So you may be wondering as to the state of the laptop I mentioned earlier:

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o234/TM20203/DSC00485.jpg
I wasn't gentle with it.

So I got the system working very well. It has good volume and sound quality. So here are some glamour shots of it:

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o234/TM20203/DSC00486.jpg
http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o234/TM20203/DSC00487.jpg

Not bad for an hours work I'd say.

These are some truly portable speakers, powered entirely by the MP3 player and using about as much juice as headphones, there are no batteries required. This'll go anywhere, and the small size makes them pocket-able.

Until Next Time, Cheers.

[aintnothang]

Playing with speakers is always fun!

[chaksq]

Cool stuff, I think I'm going to mod my 2.1 desktop speaker soon. They have some issues anyways so why not. My question for you though is how is the sound quality. Most laptops have less than great speakers. I'm kinda thinking these are better than average or else you wouldn't have bothered.

[tinker]

Pretty cool!

You just wanna make sure that the speakers aren't taking to much power to operate. If they pull to much from your Mp3 player's audio jack it can ruin the jack.

[Tavarin]

@Chaksq - Yah, they are decent speakers. They put out about the same sound quality as the portable iPod speakers. Even if they were crap I probably still would have done this just for the hell of it anyway.

@Tinker - So far the speakers aren't taking much power to operate. I've left them running for an hour to test, and the Zune and speakers still work. But I haven't actually rated the power consumption, so right now I'm more running off my hope that I don't ruin the jack.

[dak1b]

interesting mod...

[wuduheo]

Nice Zune!

[Collinstheclown]

Of course I did this with a screwdriver. How else would you get them off?

Soldering iron? :lick:

I've been meaning to make some portable battery powered speakers for work..

+rep (RATM :))




-CollinstheClown

[XcOM]

man this is an old thread, why the revival?