Category Archives: digital audio hacks

1960’s Console Stereo gets Raspberry Pi Touch Screen

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When he was but a wee hacker, [WhiskeyDrinker] loved to play with the big console stereo his grandparents had. The idea of a functional piece of furniture always appealed to him, and he decided that when he grew up and had a place of his own he’d get a similar stereo. Fast forward to the present, and a Craigslist ad for a working Penncrest stereo seemed to be a dream come true. Until it wasn’t.

As difficult as it might be to believe, sometimes things we read on the Internet are not true. The “working” Penncrest radio turned out to …read more

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Stomping On Microcontrollers: Arduino Mega Guitar Effects Pedal

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Effects pedals: for some an object of overwhelming addiction, but for many, an opportunity to hack. Anyone who plays guitar (or buys presents for someone who does) knows of the infinite choice of pedals available. There are so many pedals because nailing the tone you hear in your head is an addictive quest, an itch that must be scratched. Rising to meet this challenge are a generation of programmable pedals that can tweak effects in clever ways.

With this in mind, [ElectroSmash] are back at it with another open source offering: the pedalSHIELD MEGA. Aimed at musicians and hackers who …read more

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1920’s Claratone Radio Runs Windows 10

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In the past we’ve mentioned how there are different schools of thought in terms of how to bring a vintage piece of hardware into the 21st century. You can go down the preservationist’s route, carefully grafting the original components with more modern ones, or you can take the nuclear option and blow all that dusty old gear out of the water. [Derek Traxler] clearly decided to go with the latter option on his recent conversion of 1920’s era Claratone tube radio to an Internet radio and podcast player. Not only is there little left of the original device beyond its …read more

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Recreating the Radio from Portal

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If you’ve played Valve’s masterpiece Portal, there’s probably plenty of details that stick in your mind even a decade after its release. The song at the end, GLaDOS, “The cake is a lie”, and so on. Part of the reason people are still talking about Portal after all these years is because of the imaginative world building that went into it. One of these little nuggets of creativity has stuck with [Alexander Isakov] long enough that it became his personal mission to bring it into the real world. No, it wasn’t the iconic “portal gun” or even one of …read more

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Fooling Speech Recognition With Hidden Voice Commands

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It’s 2018, and while true hoverboards still elude humanity, some future predictions have come true. It’s now possible to talk to computers, and most of the time they might even understand you. Speech recognition is usually achieved through the use of neural networks to process audio, in a way that some suggest mimics the operation of the human brain. However, as it turns out, they can be easily fooled.

The attack begins with an audio sample, generally of a simple spoken phrase, though music can also be used. The desired text that the computer should hear instead is then fed …read more

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Printed PC Speakers Are Way Cooler Than Yours

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On the off chance you’re reading these words on an actual desktop computer (rather than a phone, tablet, smart mirror, game console…), stop and look at the speakers you have on either side of your monitor. Are you back now? OK, now look at the PC speakers and amplifier [Chris Slyka] recently built and realize you’ve been bested. Don’t feel bad, he’s got us beat as well.

The speaker and amplifier enclosures were painstakingly printed and assembled over the course of three months, and each piece was designed to be small enough to fit onto the roughly 4 in x …read more

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Making A Headphone Amp Perform New Tricks

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Hands up if you’ve had the misfortune to work in an office with a fondness for following the latest fads. Paperless office, how long did that last? Or moving from physical telephones to a flaky VOIP application on your Windows computer, that’s sure to be a resounding success! We’ve all been there at some point, haven’t we?

[Joshua Wise] found himself in that unenviable situation of the VOIP app move, and since he is a habitual headphone music listener the prospect of wearing his company-supplied headset was not appealing. His solution was to take his HeadRoom BitHead amplifier …read more

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Eight SEGAs Singing

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Way back in the dark ages, before the average computer could play back high quality recorded audio, things were done differently. Music and sounds were stored as instructions to be played back on audio synthesis chips, built into the computers and consoles of the 80s and 90s. These chips and their unique voices hold a special nostalgia that’s key to this era, making them popular to experiment with today. To that end, [little-scale] decided to wire up eight chips from the SEGA Master System to please your ears.

The chip in question is the SN76489, which we’ve also noted is …read more

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Raspberry Pi Media Streamer Is Combat Ready

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We are truly living in the golden age of media streaming. From the Roku to the Chromecast, there is no shortage of cheap devices to fling your audio and video anywhere you please. Some services and devices may try to get you locked in a bit more than we’d like (Amazon, we’re looking at you), but on the whole if you’ve got media files on your network that you want to enjoy throughout the whole house, there’s a product out there to get it done.

But why buy an easy to use and polished commercial product when you can hack …read more

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The Grafofon: An Optomechanical Sequencer

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There are quick hacks, there are weekend projects and then there are years long journeys towards completion.  [Boris Vitazek]’s grafofon falls into the latter category. His creation can best be described as electromechanical sequencer synthesizer with a multiplayer mode.
The storage medium and interface for this sequencer is a thirteen-meter loop of paper that is mounted like a conveyor belt. Music is composed by drawing on the paper or placing objects on it. This is usually done by the audience and the fact that the marker isn’t erased make the result collaborative and incremental.
 These ‘scores’ are read by a

…read more

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